I always make it a habit to ask my friends and classmates for their opinion because it brings another perspective to my point of view and they provide valuable insight that I never would've considered.
I showed two of my friends, Nathalie Gross and Kelina Van, the current version of my magazine. I then asked them what they thought about it, and I got several constructive and positive pieces of feedback.
In terms of my cover page, they loved the charcoal black background and how it heavily contrasted with the yellow masthead. However, they said that the barcode I created was too large and would look better on the left-hand side. To fix this, I generated a completely new barcode that was much narrower than the original one, and I moved it to the other corner. Lastly, my friends said that they like how the cover lines were outlined in a different color, but suggested that I flip the colors to make it easier to read. To incorporate this, I quickly went into my program, Canva, and swapped the colors.
As for my table of contents, the reception was mostly positive. Some positive feedback was that the image I featured looked cool and that the color palette works very well with the cover page and the main image. I got two subtle but very helpful pieces of constructive criticism. The first one is that I should move "contents" in the table of contents over to the left so that it doesn't look so out of place when aligned with the other half of the spread. Another was that I should change "Crazy" from the coverline: "A look inside this crazy restaurant" to "mind-blowing". After they told me their thoughts, I moved "contents" more to the left and reworded that article title.
My double-page spread was a mixed reaction. I got several positives ranging from "the two recipe pages are formatted in a very understandable manner" and that "the bold titles make the double page spread look very cool". They brought up finding a way to separate the ingredients section to make it look more professional. To achieve this, I added a T-shaped design where the ingredient name went on one side of the T and the amount on the other. Additionally, my classmates informed me that it looked very plain and that it was missing something. Therefore, I came up with the idea to draw cartoonish pieces of gnocchi, basil leaves, and a bowl of marinara sauce to add to the spread. The last constructive feedback I was given was that all of the steps should stay consistent with their colors. Since I still wanted to include both red and yellow, I opted for creating a uniform set of steps where the step number was in red and the description in yellow.
Overall, I found this entire process informative and incredibly beneficial. My friends were more than eager to help me out and since they're both enrolled in Media Studies AS Level, they know exactly what kind of feedback would best help me. I remained open-minded the entire time and took every single one of their critiques and suggestions into account. Once we finished, I took a look at what they said and completely agreed with all of their opinions. I changed my cover page, table of contents, and draft to incorporate their suggestions and found myself liking them a lot more than I previously did. I still plan on making a few edits of my own, but I'm very glad I got to talk with my classmates about this as it proved to be very helpful.
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