Evaluation Question 7 - Skills Development

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?

For my preliminary task i had to create a college magazine which would help me to get used to the programs and websites which would help me to create my music magazine.

From these pictures you can see an obvious difference between my knowledge of photoshop and its use over time, the pictures on the right are pages from my preliminary task, i didnt have alot of  experience with photoshop and i wasnt familiar with all the tools that you could use. However for my final product (pictures on the right) i had plenty of experience from practising at home, and in other courses at college, this allowed me to create a more proffesional magazine cover and contents using different layer format and properties. I used a range of different tools and techniques to create my final product, some of these are:

• I used a textured background on my cover, contents page, and double page spread which made the page look old and rough, this allowed me to attract my target audience through their stereotypical point of "not taking their time". I crinkled an a4 sheet of paper and scanned it into a computer, then i pulled it into photoshop and colour burned it onto the pages twice to make the pages darker.
• I used the outer glow tool to distintively seperate the photos of the band from the background, the problem was that the photos i took were when the band was wearing dark clothing to keep to the conventions of my target audience, however this made them blend into the dark background. I used the outer glow tool to fix this problem, this tool created a bold line around the pictures.
• I used the smudge tool to create the flames which helped to enhance the look of the block colour. This was very usefull because the plain block colour did not belong on the page because of the differences between the look of the block colour and the rock-style background, it needed an extra add to make it fit on the page and to make sure it will fit to the stereotype of rock fans.
• I used the drop shadow option to make my pictures look like they have been pinned onto the page, this was very usefull for making them stand out, and making them look alot more interesting compared to normal, flat images.

On my old, college magazine i aimed it at an audience of modern, drum and bass music fans, i used a clean, modern layout with graffiti-style font which was assosiated with the audience, however i used a rugged, crinkled look and layout to assosiate with my audience.