Pastille Magazine

You’ll all know the I’ve just finished my third year of university, but not before I created a 32-page magazine. Overall this is what I’ve loved the most during my time at the University of St Mark & St John, as I’ve created a lot of work that can be added to my portfolio. Rather than everything being coursework, we make actual things, including Radio and Film packages which I can show to future employers.

For my last module, I created a 32-page magazine with Corinne Bygrave from Organic By Nerve and another fellow Marjon student, Hannah Perks. We decided to create something very similar to Sound, the magazine we produced last semester, we had such a great time exploring Plymouth for the production of this magazine, that we felt it was fitting to create our own.

Especially as we know Plymouth quite well as we all have grown up here. Another reason behind the creation of this magazine, was because we felt the magazines currently in the Plymouth Listings market are not designed with us young people in mind. We wanted them to be more colourful, with more images to illustrate our pieces as well as having less lists and more features.

Of course this is very similar to Sound but as it was a class magazine, everyone pitched in. Where as our magazine would just be us three. Our name for our magazine, Pastille, I’m still not 100% about this, but it was settled between Corinne and Hannah, we just left it rather than going round in circles with names. Creating our magazine, was a massive learning curve for us all.

There were a lot that got in our way throughout the production but we pushed through! I’m really proud of what we all produced, it’s something I will treasure forever and say, we produced that. Yes, there are some areas that could be improved, when it came to the end of the module there was some problems between us and I feel for the situation we were in, we produced to the best of our ability.

I am really hopeful of a good grade on this, as it’s based on our personal achievement, rather than group. I created some good pieces that I am very proud of, as well as creating some good contacts as for some of my pieces I had to get in top people within companies, including the manager of Adrenalin and the admin manager & secretary for Paignton Festival.

Everyone seemed to be really interested in what I was doing and was really helpful when it came to my features. There was so much I learnt through the course of this module, I wasn’t just writing articles, I also gathered relevant adverts and took some generic images of Plymouth that we could use to illustrate not just my features, but everyone’s else.

Rather than our magazine just staying as an InDesign file, our lecturer had all our magazines professionally printed. This shows us what our magazine would look like when printed, as sometimes these things look different on a computer screen. This makes them easier to show future employers and I can not wait to show them, to see what I’ve produced during university.

Let’s get to the good bit! Here I am going to show you our magazine, let me just show how pretty it is.

This post is something a little different to what I normally post, so I hope you have enjoyed it! This magazine is something close to my heart, means the end of an era for my education career.