Evaluation- Question 7

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

The Font used in the preliminary task was simple and not very effective or eye-catching as the one which we used for our final front cover. I think that both images suit the purpose of the magazine- Its clear to see the preliminary task is for a school magazine. I don't like the fact that the coverlines go over the image of the girls on the preliminary task, i don't think that we paid much attention to the layout of the magazine or adding artistic and stylish features. I think the image for the final product is more striking than the one in the preliminary, this is because it is more engaging with the audience. The colours are more bold on our final product and more attention was payed when aiming the magazine at a specific audience. I think that the preliminary task looks more like a poster rather than a magazine front cover because of the use of one one font throughout, there is no variety which makes it quite plain and not interesting. We payed a lot of attention to detail in our final front cover to ensure that it would appeal to our target audience whereas in our preliminary task we did not take much care when i came to detailed we just looked at the overall main effect.

I think that from our preliminary task we were able to pick up ideas about what kind of composition we should have on our final product and editing our image to be appropriate for our genre. We also realized the importance of having a bold masthead and captivating coverlines.
When creating our preliminary i was not familiar with programs such as Adobe Bridge, InDesign and Pages and because this front cover was created on pages, we as a group were not very confident with how to use Pages, i think if we had spent more time learning and familiarising ourselves with Pages our front cover would look more advanced and professional. We then decided to experiment with InDesign as we researched that it was a program filled with tools that would give our magazine a sophisticated edge. However, we realised that pages was a less complex and equally as effective as InDesign for creating our front cover. 
Doing our preliminary task we  tried used programs such as PowerPoint and Microsoft Word which did not give a professional appearance to our magazine as these programs do not specialize in creating a magazine. Another issue with using Microsoft and PowerPoint was that i was not able to upload things in this format, instead i had to screenshot it to make it a JPEG image in order to upload it to my blog as an image. 
During the process of making our magazine we had issues with blogger and with using the Apple Mac's which made it difficult to reach deadlines but i was able to do work outside of school to ensure my work was handed in on time. 
Prior to my media knowledge i took art for GCSE  so i had basic understanding of PhotoShop but i couldn't use it on an advanced level so when making my magazine i learned about how to edit photos to make their appearance more appealing and suitable for a magazine. At first i used the rubber tool to erase the background and then i found how to use the magnetic tool to select particular parts of the image you want and i found this very effective because i was able to change background colours (which i did on the image for the contents page) but i found difficulties when it came to fading the image into the background to make it look more natural, i overcame this though by using the blur tool. 
When we were in the process of making our magazine we had to do several Photoshoots. The first Photoshoot we came to a unanimous decision within our group that  we thought these photos would not be striking enough for a front cover. We did another photoshoot from which we found our front cover. This process taught us a lot about styling for media and how the clothes and types of photos taken highly influence what genre of music we are working with and attracting a suitable target audience. 
Being fans of the indie rock genre we were able to gain a real understanding of what our target audience are like. We attended concerts during this process, for example Catfish and the Bottlemen, while there we were able to see what kind of clothes their fans wear and then generalised our findings to a wider range of people that listen to other bands that come under the indie rock genre. We were aware of our audiences likes and dislikes and from this were able to create something that would really capture their attention and appeal to them. We took inspiration from several magazines produced by Bauer and by IPC, we followed conventions of these popular magazines to create something that would too be popular and be well liked by the public. 
Overall i am proud of what we have produced because a year ago i would never have thought that i could produce something like this due to my inexperience with different programs. I am happy with our final chosen images as we selected a model who was young in order to appeal to the majority of the audience.