Boring Stuff that we "Have To Know"

I'm a little behind with what I'm supposed to be blogging about, so I'll just have to write twice as much in half the time... Wait, that's not right. I've still got the same amount of time... Although I am doing twice as much... Yeah.

Look, there's a reason why I didn't take maths for A level.

But I digress (yeah, I took English instead). I'll do this post for Wednesday's work - basically, it was a lesson spent doing more theory than actual practical work, which basically means it was spent "learning" or whatever, doing boring stuff that we "have to know", or something ridiculous like that, rather than the cool practical stuff we get to do with Photoshop.

There was a lot of theory we had to do. I'm talking about around five full pages of notes, with the analysis of a front cover taking up a double page spread. I made sure I analysed the hell out of that front cover. It was all about the basic and the more complicated aspects of the features that are used on the front of a magazine, the ways in which these can be used to make them look appealing to audiences, through the use of colour, font, style and contrast, interesting ways of aligning the features on the page in such a way that stands out, etc.

Basically, we learnt about the four main aspects of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity, which was related to the positioning and content of the different parts of the cover. We learnt about font styles (basically about Serif, Sans Serif, Script and Display types of font), advertising content, the attention / interest / desire and action needed to be pushed onto the reader by the design of the cover, and finally how to use the Image and the power of words to convince people to buy it.

Yeah, there was a lot of theory.

The magazine cover that I analysed the hell out of.
For some reason, Blogger decided to rotate it around. I hate this website.

Although it all makes me wonder how things stand out amongst other magazines, when they're all designed to stand out... I dunno. That's probably a question for another lesson. Or another class entirely. Perhaps even a different stage of education. I'm rambling. I'll stop that now.