Looking back at your preliminary task (the school magazine task), what
do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
When I first started my preliminary task I was clueless about designing magazines. As someone who is not a regular consumer of magazines the level of knowledge in actually laying one out was expected to be as poor as it was. My preliminary task was very basic and I had no knowledge of colour co-ordinating, structure or choosing effective font styles.
Firstly although the quality of the images used were quite good, I did not have good enough images to produce on the front cover or contents page. At the time my aim was to make the image related to the genre of the magazine rather than its quality and how the model was actually positioned. This compares to my final piece as the use of Photoshop and InDesign allowed me to understand what I was actually able to accomplish and how I could adapt and edit pictures to improve them. By my research on various music magazines this gave me the knowledge I needed to know on how to physically take successful pictures.
When it came to laying out cover lines on the front cover of a magazine, although I thought I knew what I was doing, I was clueless. I had no knowledge of using different font sizes to help specific cover lines stand out and that all cover lines to an extent should be positioned with appropriate alignment. When producing my Preliminary task I took no notice of this and decided to produce the magazine the way I thought it should be, but looking back at it now, to me it is very poor. Also, I realised that the amount of cover lines presented on the front cover of my Preliminary school magazine were not enough and in the real world would not strike the audiences attention at all. Again from masses of magazine researching which consisted having to buy multiple music magazines, I realised that all cover lines were appropriately positioned and the resizing of cover lines was used for specific facts and story lines used to attract and engage audiences.
The font used for the title of my Preliminary task was very dull and boring; it looked like it could have been created on 'Microsoft Paint'. The text was not eye catching at all and there was nothing significant and attractive about it and also had no relation to the genre of the magazine what so ever, which compares to my final production as the use of shadows and glows really helped create an effect for the magazine and made it more realistic.
When looking back at both pieces of work, I also noticed that on my Preliminary task there was no barcode or price; people could argue that as the product was produced to be distributed in school that the issued should be free, when doing my research I found out that all, if not most magazines do have a barcode and a price displayed and with the idea that my media product would be distributed in local stores this idea of inserting barcodes and including the price was vital and had to be inserted during the production of my music magazine.
Although during the Preliminary task we did not produce a double page spread (which would of been beyond disastrous) I can clearly say that whilst learning alot about the use of Photoshop and InDesign through doing the preliminary task and the construction of my front cover and contents for my music magazine, this had a huge impact on the presentation of my double page spread, leading me to create an extra page to my magazine. I learnt many techniques such as how to create drop shadows and glows, easier ways to align text, how to manipulate and insert images and text wrap along with many other things that I did not think was possible during the process of creating my school magazine.
