IN THE CLASSROOM:

What do a Goth fashion model, a 15-year-old Mexican girl and an expert on black holes have in common?

Years from now, they may all be reading a magazine created at Early College High School in Costa Mesa.

Art students at Early College, the newest campus in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, spent the last week designing magazine covers as part of a unit on graphic arts. Each student thought up a magazine name and then laid out the front cover of the first issue, with pictures, headlines and, most importantly, a catchy logo.

“At the beginning of the project, I framed it by saying I was the head of a publishing corporation and they were my graphic designers,” said art teacher Jessica Roseth.

Roseth’s ninth-grade students, the first class at Early College, have gotten an eclectic training in the arts this year, creating self-portraits, radial designs and murals. Before school gets out in June, they plan to touch on pop art. For the magazine project, they not only got to hone their artistic skills but also got to play at marketing and demographics.

On Wednesday, some students crafted their front covers at computers while others sat at the tables and designed logos with pencils and straight edges. Roseth had the class draw block letters on large sheets of paper and embellish them in different ways, in hopes of finding a single letter — a slanted X, perhaps, or a calligraphic E — that might catch a customer’s eye in the upper left corner.

Lorena Barragan, 15, a devoted reader of Seventeen, thought of a magazine for a similar readership: Fifteen, a fashion magazine for Mexican girls approaching their 15th birthday celebration, or quinceañera. Alejandro Mendoza, 14, outlined a science magazine with a cover image of a black hole sucking in the matter around it. His title: End of the World.

Janel Ramirez, 14, opted for a magazine about Goth fashion, and she had her logo already in the form of a letter V. For her title, though, she was still weighing a few options: Virus, Vendetta or Vaccine.

Raquel Arias, 14, dubbed her magazine Smile, with the S in lightning-bolt style. The logo appealed to her, she said, because she wanted a teen audience and was looking for something dynamic.

“I wanted my magazine to be about unique teens,” she said.