Evaluation - Question 7

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

Prior to the creation of my music magazine, when working on my preliminary task I had never used Adobe Photoshop before therefore, I have very basic skill, in addition I had very limited photgraphy skills. In my prelimiary task I took under 10 photos for my magazine which evidently is not enough when creating a music magazine and therefore, this doesn't give me a lot of photos to work from. This is in contrast to my music magazine as I took a large amount to give myself more options when choosing phots for my magazine. Eventhough, I did cut my front cover photo from it's background in my preliminary task it was done very poorly as you can clearly see the edges are jagged, I also used no effect on my photo, this was again due to limited skills. It is evident in my music magazine that I have used a range of effects on photos which include; the exposure of an image, changing the photo to black and white by editing the levels etc.


When doing my preliminary task my planning consisted of a sketch for my front cover and contents page; it some sense this was very helpful as it did give me some guidance into how I wanted to design my magazine on photoshoot however, I had no direction on other aspects such as the colour scheme etc. I also did no research on my target audience e.g. what their interest were etc. Therefore, for my music magazine I spent weeks planning my magazine e.g. the genre of my magazine, my target audience, what are my target audiencese interests/what will attract them to my magazine, the colour scheme I will use throughout, sell lines, the content I will include - in addition to this I looked at other magazines that are successful in this industry e.g. 'Q' and 'NME' and how I could get my music magazines to similar standards. Overall, this gave me an extremly clear direction of what I wanted my overall outcome of my magazine to look like.


Overall, I think the biggest progress I have made is my skills within Photoshop. It is clear from my preliminary task that my pages are extremly basic; my contents page consists of a plain text for the heading and for the pages therefore, illustrating my lack of exploration within Photoshop. This is a massive contrast to the contents page in my music magazine, my contents is now split up into sections making it very easy for my readers to navigate to, I have used gradients at the top of each section which is much more effective than having a plain shape. In addition, I have used a variety of images which all have been edited e.g. exposure levels to make the photo more professional and sophisticated instead of just inserting the image how it is, as this just looks too basic and creates a very 'amateur' look. Although, a lot of my images that eventually used are on location, I did improve in cutting my model out of the background, I had to do this when creating smaller issues of my magazine which were placed on my contents page, as one of the issue covers had a photo that had been taken in the studio; although not obvious my skills did improve here as I learnt how to correctly remove a model from the background and have no jagged edges remaining. I have also improved in editing e.g. adding a drop shadow to text and shapes to create a 3D look, and adding a bevel to my button on the front page to make it overall stand out against everything else on the page.