Conclusion

Overall I am pleased with the final outcome of my music magazine. I believe that 'Electric' magazine is a success in terms of its suitability to my target audience, its consistent and professional style, and the way in which it follows codes and conventions of current music magazines. I feel as though I have learnt a lot throughout this process and been able to create a realistic front cover, contents page and double page spread for a dance/clubbing music magazine. I am extremely proud of the finished result and will be publishing the final product as my last blog post.

Evaluation - question seven

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

My preliminary task consisted of creating a front cover draft and contents page draft for a college magazine. This was to give me a chance to develop some skills and a rough understanding of the process of creating a magazine and the software used, before embarking on the real task of creating a front cover, contents page and double page spread for a music magazine.

Now looking back at my pre lim task and comparing it to my finished music magazine, I am able to identify what I learnt and how I progressed along this process. You can see one of the main differences between the two is the content. There is a large lack of detail in the front cover and contents page of the college magazine compared to my music magazine, showing how spending a large amount of time researching and preparing for the creation of a magazine really helps you to produce rich, detailed and accurate content. The general style of my pre lim task was very minimal, and this is obvious now that I compare it to my finished music magazine. I think this is partly because the process of creating my music magazine pages meant I had the time to establish a consistent style and format, including layout, font and colour schemes. I definitely used Photoshop and other technologies to a much higher and in depth level, this is obvious when you compare my finished product to the pre lim task, as I feel it looks a lot more professional and more varied features are used, such as the main image covering the masthead, text boxes, and extra images. I believe there are some similarities between my preliminary task and my final product, for example, they both have font and colour schemes that compliment the target audience and genre, and they both have one main subject to focus the reader’s attention on. You can clearly see how my technical skills, creativity and organisation has improved from the pre lim task to the end of the main task. I am very happy with the progress made and feel as if the preliminary task was a great basis for me to develop my skills against.

Evaluation - question six

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

I feel as if although I had some knowledge of photography before this project, I improved my skills and learnt more about taking a successful portrait image for the front cover of the magazine. I gained further experience working with a model in a pretty professional environment and experimented with lighting, expression and positioning.

In terms of what I learnt about Photoshop during this project, I feel my skills broadened a lot more. I discovered new features of Photoshop such as the ‘quick selection tool’ and text in Photoshop. I also improved my knowledge of layers. I was able to cut out my main image from it’s background and change the overall colour, I also learnt how to erase part of the masthead where it covered the model’s face - all these aspects improved my cover and made it look professional. I had never used text in Photoshop before, so this was something new for me, I learnt how to create boxes to frame the text and how to change the size, colour etc. The programme I used for the double page spread was InDesign, I had never used this software before and so learnt quite a lot about it whilst experimenting with the creation of my magazine article. I gained knowledge about how images work in InDesign, bleed and slug, placing text in columns, and how to curve the shape of the text box to follow the outline of the model’s hair.

Challenges I faced throughout this project included working with text in Photoshop, which I didn’t necessarily overcome, but instead learned to adjust to, creating separate layers for each piece of text and remembering to select the correct layer before moving items. I found it difficult to colour fill text boxes in Photoshop as well, but I overcame this issue by creating a coloured shape and placing it behind text, then linking the layers so they moved together. On my front cover, I had many different attempts at cutting out the main image from it’s background as I needed to ensure it had a smooth edge and looked professional, but I found the ‘refine edge’ tool helped with this. I did struggle to keep things straight and organised, and I discovered the best option to help me with this was to create guidelines and then remove them afterwards. I also had problems transferring certain items from Photoshop to InDesign but I used the internet to help me overcome this issue.

Photoshop, photography and InDesign were not the only technologies I learnt about during this process, I also used Blogger for the first time. This increased my knowledge of web design, writing quick but engaging blog posts and embedding content from YouTube, Slide Share etc. I made sure I presented my blog professionally and that its style reflected the content.

Evaluation - question five

Evaluation - question four

Evaluation - question three

Question three from fabiennelana

Evaluation - question two