OOooo! Competition hey? Cool! I love friendly competition... just let me make a quick call to my friendly friends who happen to own a lot of friendly baseball bats... don't worry, they will not hurt you, just smash up all of you computers and documents in the name of friendly competetive business hehe!
I only just seen this today, but it's cool to see someone else giving this a shot. I know first hand it is a lot of work!
As you mentioned, it's more of a rough draft preview, so don't go giving yourself to much of a hard time over it!
Couple of things about the mag :
- I like the idea of a bit more of a mix of serious and games. My 880 Gamer mag just mainly focuses on gaming, but you're mag tries to be a bit more serious like Amiga Computing back in the day.
- I also like the idea of you been an 'outsider' to the Amiga community and new to it all. Go with this! Sometimes we old time Amiga'ns look at things with hazey vision... if you think its rubbish, call it! You could also do reviews on each Amiga computer (if you can get access to the hardware) and give a score, which would be cool.
- I agree with Korodny about the name. APOV was a certain magazine and of certain style, which you are not trying to replicate. Your magazine is original, and thus should have an original name. Doesn't have to be anything fancy, but something that states what the magazine is about.
- Yes, there are layout issues, but man... you should have seen my first attempts! lol! I like the font, and the contents page which uses big block colours. Why not run with this style through the magazine. Like use a big colour block at the top of each section which is the same as the contents page (i.e. News Grey, Grumpy git Purple etc..)
- Grumpy git is a great idea, and you could take this places for sure!
- Screen shots. I notice the screen shots you take have the big black borders around them. I use FS-UAE on Ubuntu, and when it takes a screenshot there is a version which is cropped. This is great as you do not have those borders and only on screen action. If you are using WinUAE, I would presume there is option for screen shots for this as well. Do this and it will make things look a real lot nicer!
Don't stress, I am no graphic designer and Codetapper can vouch I do not have journalism skills as he constantly agonises over my basic spelling and grammar errors. Is it 'loose' or 'lose'?
The important part is you enjoy making it! Even if no one read 880, I still had fun making it and still would! But it does take time, my first issue took a few months, and most of that was just working out how to design it all, how to put it together and come up with the idea. Once you have that though, you can use previous issues as templates which then makes following issues a lot easier
Anyways, this is a long post. I wish you luck with this project, and I look forward to your official issue 1 (which ever name it come out with).
Cheers,
Mark