Preliminary Task - School Prospectus Front Cover

The Asigment: School Prospectus Front Cover

My asignment was to create a front cover for my school's (St. Edmunds College) prospectus. There were two requirements of the front cover. it had to have an image related to the school and an image of a student/students on the cover.

Research

I started off by looking at the existing school prospectus to find out the key elements of a school prospectus. The main thing about a school prospectus is that it needs to look smart and respectable. It needs to advertise the school in a positive manner and make it stand out. It needs to have a smart layout and easy to read and understand formal text and headlines.

Target Audience

The main audience for a school prospectus is going to be parents looking for a school to send their children. Students may also look at it but the main target audience is parents. As a parent your going to look for the best school to send your child where they can get a good education. The school prospectus is a major part of advertisement for a school because its one of the first things a parent will look at. They choose to visit or not visit the school based on the school prospectus, so its essential to make a good first impression.

Gathering the images i needed

For the main image on the front cover i decided to use a picture of the front of the school from an angle. I first went to the front of the school and sat down on the wall and consider how best to take a shot of the front of the school building. I then walked back and forth looking at different angles, i took several shots with the media studies camera, this would later allow me to choose the best out of all of the images. i then went to the third floor of the left hand side of the main building and took a high angle shot look down the side of the building and incluiding a a side shot of the chapel.

For the student photo i took a picture of my friend against a white background for editing purposes. this would allow me to easily remove the background later and add him to the main image of the school. I had him whearing his six form suit to make him look formal and scholarly.

Putting it all together

To put everything together, edit photos, combine everything, and rezise images i used Adobe Photoshop CS3. I started of removing the white background from the picture of the student using the quick selection tool and background eraser tool. i then opened up the picture of the school and realized it was to big for A4. so I used the set crop function to draw an A4 size crop box on the image. I then moved the box around until i found a cropped iamage that looked good. I then put the image of the student onto the image of the school and faded it so it blended in more smoothly.

For the title i decided to have a more professional look by make the title on a white background and then have a line below it seperating the title box from the image of the school and the student.
Below is an iamge of the front cover at this stage in the design.