Magazine front cover work

My first piece of Media coursework was to create a magazine front cover and contents page for our school; Montsaye Academy. we could choose a category within that such as Montsaye sports or particular school events. I chose to base my magazine on sixth form at Montsaye because I thought this would be easy to select images for and create cover lines for, it also ties in really well as I have just started sixth form.

To start off with I used my knowledge from last year studying magazines in GCSE media and included the main magazine features such as Puffs, Cover-lines, a strap-line and I tried to use contrasting colours.
In the strap line I used contrasting colours in the text and puff, I used yellow and red because they contrast really well and it still gets key information across to the consumer from a distance.
I overlapped the sixth form centre building over the masthead because this is a popular magazine technique to show that your magazine is popular as you don't need to see the whole masthead to see what it is.
I thought about the Maslow theory when I took my images because this encourages self esteem. This is because the images persuade other people to come and study at Montsaye; it shows students studying with their friends and the new sixth form centre which is advertising the school to the target audience. The only thing I would improve about the images would be to have one using direct address from one of the students or teachers smiling as this would also encourage self esteem. I would also add more girls to the images as its only boys which could be seen as sexist.
I selected the colour blue for one of the puffs and the main cover line as these compliment the colours of the school logo and the sky to show that there is some connection within the magazine and that its not all contrasting.

overall I think my magazine has been successful but I think that there is still room for some improvement like a wider range of images and maybe changing the layout a bit to make it more effective.