Q7: Looking back at your preliminary task (the college magazine task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

From my preliminary task, to my main task I think I have learnt a lot from using Photoshop. My knowledge and skills of Photoshop have developed as I have been creating my magazine. Whilst creating my preliminary task I have learnt the basics, such as, cropping an image, scaling and rotating an image. I have learnt how to use the magic wand tool to discard certain sections of the image, uploading images in to a page and the use of layers. My finished product was more complicated when it came to using Photoshop as I was aiming for more of a specific audience being part of a sub-culture. I needed to research already existing magazines and how they used advertisements and the colours of their magazine to attract their target audience. This included things like fashion, technology, films and CD’s. To help me with my target audience I created a mood board to narrow down the specifics of my audience. The design of my college magazine was more based around any type of student that attended college but with my music magazine it needed to be more specific in terms of the design. Because my audience was more specific with my finished product it was easier to design my magazine due to the colours and layout that I thought would attract my audience. For my college magazine my contents page was very basic and mainly contains things like jobs, college dates and upcoming events within the college. This is very different to my music magazine contents page as it is much more detailed, a more appealing page and was dominantly about music and lifestyle. For my magazine I included things like interviews, fashion, reviews, competitions and a gig guide. I was not confident when using Photoshop to begin with but as the lessons went on I used it more often and my confidence grew in terms of using it. I would sometimes use my private studies to become more familiar with the software. I found that the design that I wanted for my magazine was hard to do as I had little experience with Photoshop but i did get help from a teacher to find out how to do it. I found things like cropping an image, adjusting brightness and contrasts, and using the text tool quite easy as it was quite simple to use. Other skills that I picked up was with my images I found that I could use a drop shadow effect to make the images and the text stand out more on the page. I still do not know everything that I could do with Photoshop but I hope to discover them and be able to use more tools to make my work more appealing. Using layers and knowing how to use the layers was a critical aspect of creating my magazine. I needed to know how to put some layers in front of others and learnt how to link layers so it took up less of my time trying to move individual layers when I could move more than one at once. To boost my retail ability for my magazine I needed to look very closely at the detail of existing magazines and discover how to make my magazine just as appealing or maybe more. For my college magazine it was very basic and therefore I was not that worried about the appearance as it was never going to be in any shops. But for my finished product I spent more of my time on and cared more for my images and the alignments of my texts.

Overall by doing my preliminary task it helped me to make my finished product what it is by giving me that experience of using Photoshop. The hardest part of my magazine was trying to make sure that it appealed to my target audience and creating the design, using certain colours and the content of my magazine.