Magazine Cover
The next task for my Year 11's was to create a magazine cover by using Adobe InDesign and some Photoshop.
Firstly we completed Mr Joel Aarons’ tutorial on creating a magazine cover in Adobe InDesign as to get an idea of how the program works. We then worked through the tutorial on how to create magazine design elements in InDesign.
See the videos below
Once the students had completed the tutorials, it was then time for them to create their own magazine covers. The task was to recreate, as accurately as possible, one of the magazine covers that I had in the room. They had to do their best to recreate the masthead, the colour scheme, the design elements and the layout. The other requirement was that the main image had to be of themselves or a classmate. For this, each student had their photo taken in front of a white wall. Some of the photos that we took were underexposed and we didn’t have the time to retake the shots. This turned out to be a great learning opportunity as we learnt how to correct an underexposed photograph in Photoshop by adjusting the levels. Once the photos had been adjusted we then used the refine edge tutorial (now called select and mask I think?) to get a clean cut out of the image and to remove the background.
See the video below
The video also showed the students how to use Adobe's Dynamic Linking system to go from Photoshop to InDesign which is an awesome workflow feature!
The students then created their magazine covers and while I was happy for them to just re- create the covers I, got them to have some fun with it and change the magazines names and storylines etc which they seemed to enjoy.
Overall, this mini project went pretty well and the students picked up the program easily and had a lot of fun with it. I am also happy that we were able to incorporate the use of Adobe Photoshop and also some photography.
See some of the student work samples below. I really love the first one starring Nathan. Its simply amazing!
