Question 7

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

As shown in the diagram directly below is the post production of my college magazine .

The progression of my work is shown throughout the media pieces I have done. For example I could see a significant improvement when I analyzed the layout of the final outcome of my music magazine as I incorporated all the aspects that I had either forgotten to use or used too many different font colours in my previous preliminary piece which was the college magazine.   

I have been using Photoshop for some time now and I feel that I have improved as within the time between the college magazine and working on the music magazine I had been experimenting with the Photoshop software to gain the skills I needed to be successful. Also by creating drafts I could analyse them and decided to use a combination of them all to create an effective outcome.  

One key factor that I had the most trouble with was deciding what information to put on each page knowing that in the previous work, which was the college magazine I did not have an allocated amount of pages to create so I was freer to know exactly what would go where. Whereas in the music magazine I had to create a minimum of 80 pages which was the average amount of pages used by the publishing agencies when creating a music magazine this also depends on who their target audience will be.

This was another thing that I found beneficial to me was that I did have the academic discipline to be able to stick to the allocated times I set to work on the music magazine. By achieving this I have always been able to meet the deadlines allocated and do extra work, which was done by organising my work load. 

From the post production feedback I found out that people liked the layout but the only problem that was acknowledged was that the colour of the title of the Double Page Spread was visible but hurt someone's eyes, but the audience feedback provided me with the findings that I expected. If I had the chance to make a modification I would improve it by changing the colour to something a little less bold. I chose to make the title red as I knew it would be eye-catching against the dark purple background and  this was something that I tried to change I tested out other colours but they were either too light or too dark so it so not visible.

I found it very important that I had created a few drafts of my front page, contents page, Double Page Spread as by doing this it was easier for me to decide which one was the best or whether I should use a collaboration of all of them to create a professional piece. In my creative decision I decided to go with an collaboration of all the drafts I created as I felt that just by using one draft it would not have been effective enough to attract the audience. This is why the image below which was print screened there is a line in the middle so that I could make the entire page in proportion by used the line as a guide line of where exactly to put things.

  

When analyzing the previous versions of the Front Cover Page, Double Page Spread, and Contents page's I could see that the layout was slightly wrong as I did not take into account that the page would be folded in the middle. I had to print my work out so I could see if the text was the correct size, as if the text or images were too big I could modify them before I completed the final outcome. It was my creative decision to put the photographs below in a slanted manner as I felt that this was an unconventional way to layout them out.