Question 7:

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

Throughout the media course I believe I have shown significant improvement as I initially began the course unable to manipulate my College Magazine to a High Quality. Whereas with my Music Magazine I had learn't everything I needed to know about creating a professional product. After using Photoshop for the majority of the AS Year I then acquired the skills I needed to create a successful music magazine as I then know how to create a 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. 

During the production stage of the preliminary piece of work I decided use several different colours to to use for my cover-lines, masthead and selling-line's. A factor that effected the success of my College magazine was that I had chosen not to stick with a colour scheme and that I had used too many different fonts this did not make my magazine look professional. In the diagram on the left hand side is an JPEG image of the college magazine I had created. I have analysed it's success to identify which flaws I could then modify when I had to create my music magazine. When analysing the College magazine's success I feel that certain aspects of the colour scheme made my product unsuccessful, for example using several different colours for my colour scheme my audience were unable to understand what was the most important text. Also the JPEG image below is of my College Magazine's contents page a problem I face with this was that I could not come up with enough page ideas to fill the whole page with information.  

For the College Magazine I did not have an allocated amount of pages to create so I was freer to know exactly what would now 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. A vital skill that I had obtained during the AS year of the course was time management. I found it to be quite beneficial as I was able to continuously improve my drafts until I had perfected the layout. By having good time management skills, it enabled me to hand in the work on the deadlines given. By achieving these deadlines allocated I could then do extra work because I had organisied my work load so effectively. 

Whilst analysing the layout of the post production outcome of my music magazine I have demonstrated the skills I have learnt as I was able to stick to a colour scheme that I had chosen. The thing I found the use of a specific colours to be really important as by using a bold bright colour for the Masthead in order to capture the audience's attention and the use a neutral colour for the Cover-lines and Selling-line that the audience were able to read.

To achieve creative success I had to analyse the and correct the faults within my product may it be in the sizing of the font or the general layout of the pages. This was a limitation as I had to continously correct errors and reprint drafts to see if the font sizing looked accurate. I found it essential that I used the correct mode of address, I knew I had to talk directly to the audience so this influenced me into using a direct mode of address.   

Through the audience feedback's comments I was provided with my target audience's thoughts The creative decision to make the Masthead purple as I knew it would be eye-catching against the dark graffitied background. 


The final outcome was achieved by trying out various different colours on the Masthead to verify which colour looked the most appropriate. By testing out the  colours I could then see which were appealing and which one's were just not visible. Below is an example of one of the previous versions of my Front Cover page.  I was able to reflect on the use of design drafting through the process of drafting several different copies of my music magazine, this enabled me to criticise my own work and look at it from a consumer's perspective this enabled me to decide aspects I should then collaborate to create a professional post production product.In my creative decision I decided to go with a 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 I was aiming my product at.

The Screen Grab below is of the final post production magazine front cover page's feedback I had received from publishing it on Facebook. The majority of feedback I had received was positive as the liked the over all layout and colour scheme however the negative feedback was just about the colour of the selling line.

The audience feedback of all three product confirmed my expectations of how successful my products would be. If I had another chance to do a music magazine during the pre production stage I would conduct another survey asking people from my target audience's age range what colours they would want to be included and what fonts they would like.  In order to create my products I took inspiration from previous existing music magazines this is how I was how I took influence in the layout. 

A problem solving decision I used was to print my work several times in order to make sure the font size was correct and if the text or images were too big I could modify them before I completed the final outcome. Whilst analysing 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.

It was my creative decision to put the photographs below in a slanted manner as I felt that this was an unconventional way to lay them out. This is why I decided to demonstrate the double page spread I had created using Photoshop in the Screen Grab below, the use of a grid to help me indicate where the middle of the page was so that I could place me image in exactly the right place and make the entire page in proportion.