College Magazine Front Cover Analysis - 04/02/2011

These are the front covers' of two college newsletters: Deyes High School and St Ambrose Barlow. The Deyes cover is very bland and boring compared to the bright white-on-red masthead of St Ambrose, and St Ambrose tends to stand out more to the reader than the Deyes newsletter. The Deyes cover uses only black and white, which is not eye-catching or interesting to the reader at all; and there seems to be no clear anchorage - it looks as if the pictures and text were just randomly thrown together at the last minute! Also, there are three different types of fonts used on the Deyes cover, and it is unneccessary for the tiny amount of text there is. The 'DEYES HIGH SCHOOL' heding uses a formal serif (edged/lined) font, and then suddenly changes to the sans serif (rounded) font of comic sans which is quite an informal/unprofessional and childish font in contrast to the previous serif font.

Despite the St Ambrose cover being more bright and eye-catching, it still has it's flaws too. This cover uses the sans serif comic sans font in its masthead too, which creates a lack of professionalism. The yellow sun-shaped puff in the bottom left-hand corner of the cover also looks like it was just put in the magazine as a way to fill in empty space, as an after thought, and looks childish and unprofessional compared to the rest of the newspaper-style layout. There is also too much text, which causes the cover to look more like the inside of a college magazine rather than the front cover. The reader is not going to be able to read the whole text at the first glance in contrast with the Deyes cover where there is so little text that the reader instantly knows what the newsletter is about. However, this large amount of text can make the magazine look more like a professional newspaper rather than a magazine put together at the last minute. The layout is also easy to read, and the contents column lets the reader know what to expect throughout the magazine. Therefore, I think that the St Ambrose Barlow cover is better than the Deyes High cover.