My Final Evaluation

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

From the Preliminary task, I have learnt how to use professional technologies like Photoshop to create professional media products, with better understanding than before. I have also learnt that the audience is the main propeller when designing/creating a magazine- everything depends on the audience and the genre of the magazine. For the Preliminary task, I did not carry out as much research as I did for the main task. For instance, in my main task I analysed magazines such as Rocksound and Mixmag to scrutinise their use of conventions for their specified genre- which were rock and hip-hop. I also sketched layouts and titles for the front page, contents page and double page spread so that when I was ready to create them on Photoshop, I had a plan of how I wanted my finished product to look and the knowledge of how I would be able to achieve that – rather than just playing around with layouts until I made one I liked, like I had done with my preliminary task. My further research consisted of me evaluating other magazines, taking notice of their use of; fonts, house-styles, use of images, image sizes ect. The research was useful in that I was able to use other rock/alternative magaines for ideas on the subject choices, effective layouts, how my images would appear and also the colour scheme. Comparing the image manipulation of my Preliminary task to my music magazine, I noticed that I editted each image in a lot more detail and used a larger variety of tools, for instance – I had not really touched the drop shadows, the liquify tool, hue/saturation and contrast tools in my preliminary task where in my music magazine I used all those tools. Even though I feel like I have made a large improvement from my Preliminary task, I think that there are still many improvements I could have made on my music magazine. For example, I would have prefered to have used more unisex images and included male artists rather than strictly all female as even though I wanted the bias towards females, it ended up too strong and resulted in possibly turning male readers’ interests off. Despite this, I do think that I was succesful in relating to the genre I chose and the target audience as a whole.