Evaluation: 7.Looking Back At Your Preliminary Task, What Do You Feel You Have Learnt In The Progression From It To The Full Product?

Preliminary Task

Final Product

At the beginning of the course, I thought that when it came to creating a magazine it would be easy to make. However, the more I learned about how to create it, the more I began to understand that there was more to it than I expected. My preliminary task was of a college magazine, and I started off by simply putting text on the photo and going by what I thought would be a good front cover. But after I looked at it and compared it to my final product, I realise the progression I have made from when I first started.

What I have learned over the course is to research, so that it will help me with my plan for how I want to create my magazine. I knew that I wanted to do the dance music genre as I thought it would be different. By researching other magazines that are similar to this genre, this helped me create a plan as to how I wanted my magazine to look and how I would go about creating it. This allowed me to understand the genre and what I could do to create my own product that would fit into this genre, and I think that it worked because 'Mix-mag' was one of the magazine that I researched and played an important role in how I came to have my final product.

Also, I have learned more Photoshop skills in the progression of going from my preliminary to my final product. At the beginning, even though I had used Photoshop before, I didn't have many skills which allowed me to create an effective magazine cover. This can be seen, as in the Preliminary Task I used the original photo that I had taken, and only added the text onto the front cover, along with the social media logos and the bar code. However, by using Photoshop more and using other websites to help me with my editing, my skills began to improve. On the final version of my front cover, the two people weren't stood in front of a red backdrop. I used 'burner.bonanza.com', which is a background burner which allowed me to remove the background and create a transparent background as a replace, which I found really useful because I didn't have to worry about having a plain white background, so this allowed me to use others. This suggests that my skills have improved, because before I wouldn't have used other websites to help me create my front cover, instead I would have remained using Photoshop.

 The design of my magazine has been another progression. My college magazine was simple and much thought wasn't put into it, whereas my final product has more thought put into it. At the beginning, I thought that by having everything large and stand out would be effective and eye capturing , but as I did my research and looked more into the dance music genre, I realised that it didn't always have to be about having large fonts. Instead, bright colours appeared to be more effective, along with small font because 'Mix-Mag' did this on their magazines, so I decided to use this on my own product and it turned out to be effective because it made the large font stand out more, along with the artists which I found worked very well.