My finished Preliminary Task products

I would argue that succesful features of my product would be clean organised layout - as the front cover does not appear cluttered with infortmation and the contents page is organised and easy to read. I also think that the front cover is interesting and invites the audience to pick it up and read it due to it's cover lines and the model's stare, which makes the reader feel like they're personally being addressed when they see her looking at them.
What I think is unsuccesful about my product is that the front cover is not very genre neutral in regards to it's appeal to the student population. Because of the use of darker colours and titles, the magazine gives off an 'emo' attitude which would obviously not appeal to all college students like the design brief asked for.

New skills I developed while undertaking the preliminary task mostly include those involved with photoshop, but also include those in identifying target audiences as well.
As I am new to photoshop, the preliminary task provided an oppurtunity to experiment with a variety of it's tools that could should prove useful when working on the main task. Specific examples would be manipulating the text layers and their shadows and outlines to make fonts stand out better from the background, affecting the transparency of certain layers to create small areas to have different textures to how the usually would if I kept the layers opaque - such as in the front cover's blue strip with it's heading titles. I also got to improve my skills on giving people 'touch-ups' such as making their eyes stand out better by setting the burn tool onto shadows with a low exposure and using it on their eye liner and lashes to make them darker and stand out better. I also got to practice using the dodge tool to whiten certain areas, which I did on the eyes and teeth of the model on the front cover. Another feature I felt I improved on using was the hue, saturation and brightness of a picture. Using them made the background picture much richer in colour and stirking by changing the hue to a redder tone and tweaking the brightness and saturation accordingly to keep it looking natural.
I think that I also improved my audience relation skills during the preliminary task due to the research that was carried out on existing magazines where I identified their intended audiences and looked at HOW the targetted their audiences by use of head lines, well placed ads and general themes they used throughout.