contents page research and mock magazine cover

I looked through a lot of school magazine and normal magazine contents pages, some of them seem adventurous and so seem boring . In order for the the magazine to stand out i need a good front cover and contents page , i need to get the right balanced between interesting but not too over the top so it crowds the page .
In my mock magazine cover i used bright blue colours to symbolise school colours , even though its a magazine for 6th form i thought it would be fitting to have school colours for the front cover and the contents page .

For the front cover mock-up i used mostly blue and white , the reason for this is because the white stood out from the dark blue background and the light blue background made the dark blue masthead stand out , i put the main articles on the front , the ones that would grab more attention , this picture would obviously be in the middle and the text would be on top of it , but you Will still be able to see the blue it will be kind of like a border .I think the blue connotes to the school , its a simple colour but stands out more than anything .

With the contents page i decided to keep the blue vibe going , but this time only used white text , i know the contents page is supposed to be as good as the front cover , if anything better . So that's why I'm going to but more images in to make it a bit more interesting because at the moment its very bland and it need something . i decided to kinda manipulate the colour so the bottom of the front cover is a dark blue and the top is a light blue , i swapped it around with the contents page to make the top dark and the bottom light .