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?

Form looking back at my preliminary task I have learnt the best ways to present a cover of a magazine, in my preliminary magazine the cover lines were all spread out with a big gap between lines of the same cover line. This makes it harder to determine where one cover line ends and one starts. In my music magazine I have made the lines on the same cover line closer together. I have also made the fonts easier to read and the colours of the cover lines are easier to see compared to the background. On the cover lines and the masthead I have created a stroke effect around the words making it easier to read. I have also linked colours from the masthead and cover lines. When it comes to the image on the cover of my music magazine, I have made the subject of the image the only thing in the shot on the cover. On my college magazine I have made a corridor the background with lots of things in the shot to draw the eye away from the person. In my music magazine I have made it so there is nothing else except the magazines contents to look at. I have also made the cover lines bigger in my music magazine to make them easy to see and it will draw the audience to read them. With the cover image I have used on my music magazine, I have used the magnetic lasso tool to cut out the image of the person and then I have put it onto a blank white background which I used a gradient tool to create a coloured background onto it. I have also used the gradient tool to create a light to dark colour on the cover lines are the masthead.

On my contents page, I have improved a lot. On my college magazine, there are no images, and there isn’t a very strong structure to it with just the words in the middle of the page. For the music magazine I have created I have added images, a structure, features and regulars. This separates different sections of the magazine and makes the audience want to read it more as it is more appealing. On my college magazine the numbering of all of the contents is consistent which means the audience know exactly what is in the magazine and can just scan to see the exact page of what they want to see. This means that the audience will not read all of the way through the magazine and contents will not be read. For the image I have used for the album artwork on my music magazines contents page, I have used a contrast and brightness effect to change the colours for it making the colours more vivid and clear compared to the dark background.