Preliminary Exercises

Several preliminary exercises were completed before beginning this project. One activity we did was mark up the covers of magazines in order to learn the conventions of a magazine cover. We learned the aspects such as sweet spots, mast heads, puffs, etc.This activity helped us to learn the setup of a magazine cover and the aspects involved in making our own magazine cover. It helped in learning the purpose of all of the different conventions on a cover and to see what each specific piece was meant to do. We labeled several covers to fully understand the conventions of a magazine cover as well as what magazines use to make themselves stand out. We learned about the house style that magazines use to make themselves unique as well as the ode of address they use.

We used the first activities to complete our next preliminary exercise. We used what we learned about the conventions of magazine covers and applied it to creating our own magazine cover. We created a hip hop magazine titled "Music Monthly." We made this magazine where everything but the photo was hand drawn. We used our own house style and mode of address to make our magazine unique, and put into use all of the conventions we learned about from the previous activities into use. We utilized puffs, incentives, buzz words, a slogan, and many more conventions. This project was our first experience creating a magazine cover and it taught us how to approach making one in the future.

Annotated magazine for conventions

The preliminary magazine cover we created