SCHOOL MAG:VISUALISE YOUR magazine. Will it be stylish, spare, full of white space and sharp imagery? Or will it be energetic, busy, colourful, chaotic?
Are you going for The Glossor Heat? Take some time with your team to look through all sorts of magazines and tear out pages and designs you like. Bring in whatever mags you can find at home, look at The Ticketin Friday's Irish Times. Make a mood board and discuss as a class what elements you might like to use for your own mag. You want your magazine to be original, but it's no harm to get familiar with how the professionals do it.
Brainstorm new ideas for headlines, bylines, page numbers, imagery. We have seen some very inventive design ideas in Schoolmag, such as the team that carved their names in trees or wrote them in dust on old cars, took pictures and used them as byline photos. Or the school that created a whole magazine in two colours, black and pink (and went on to win the design category). Another winning school embroidered their front page.
It’s important to have some agreement on the look of your magazine early on, because it will dictate elements such as article length, the photos you’ll need and the fonts you use. If everyone has a shared vision for the look of your mag from day one you have a better chance of pulling a coherent magazine together in the final weeks, rather than a scrapbook of last-minute design.
Next week: using design software
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