At the beginning of the course I produced a
school magazine front page and contents page, which was my preliminary task. As
you can probably see the magazine looks very un-professional, as I did not know
how to take effective pictures, use Photoshop CS3 effectively or create a
magazine in general. However after spending a lot of time researching, planning
and drafting I understood as I went on how to create a professional looking
magazine that will attract the audience.
Firstly I believe my general knowledge and
understanding on magazines has improved tremendously as before I started doing
my research I had no understanding on how a music magazine is usually set out
and what the editors do to capture the audience. After I had completed the
first couple of tasks which were analyzing I was getting to grips with what I
had to do; for instance in my preliminary task the sell line for my main article
was the same size as the other sell lines, after analyzing front covers I
realized that the main feature sell line tends to always be larger than other
sell lines. I also learnt that magazines don’t usually have that much empty
space as they try to put the highest possible amount of information in them. As
you can see I had plenty of empty spaces in my contents page for my preliminary
task, however after analyzing some contents pages I realized that for your
magazine to look professional it should have hardly any empty spaces, unless
you want the ‘simple’ look. Another thing I learnt from analyzing magazines was
that there is always a colour theme to the magazine, for instance Q magazine
has a red, black and white colour theme.
Secondly, I learnt how I should go about
when taking pictures; at first when taking pictures for the preliminary task I
didn’t really know what I was doing and what type of angle or distance I had to
be in relation to the model. However after looking at magazines, especially vibe,
it gave me an idea of the type of picture I wanted in my magazine. So my
ability to take photos has improved dramatically in comparison to the quality
of the pictures in my preliminary task magazine. As you can see in my final
magazine the pictures are to a high quality when considering the angle of the
picture and the sharpness.
The other aspect that I have improved on is
the technology side, such as editing pictures in Photoshop and creating a
magazine in InDesign. Firstly to create pictures that look very clear and
professional you need to edit it, whether it is just to take out the background
or to change the colour. I believe I have improved my ability to change an
average picture to a very good picture through Photoshop and this has helped me
when it came to improving the photos in my magazine. I have also learnt how to
use a completely new software to me, this is called ‘InDesign’ it is a program
that specializes in creating magazines. I learnt how to create a magazine on
the program and all the tips and tricks you can do, such as wrap the text
around an image or create a boarder that goes on every page using ‘masterpage’.
Overall I believe that I have succeeded in learning new things from how
a magazine works to how to use computer programs. It has also taught me how to
research and plan for something which in this case was my magazine as before I had
never planned to create something such as a magazine.
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