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

For my preliminary task I made a magazine called ‘Haydon Weekly’. I made a front cover and a contents page. My product has vastly improved and I now have a music magazine called InD with a front page, contents page, double page spread and four more pages for the article. Firstly my use and understanding of InDesign has improved. At first I didn’t really know how to use the programme as I had never used it before, but by the end of my music magazine, I could confidently use it and make my magazine look like a real product. Also, my use of Photoshop improved vastly. I didn’t even use it in my preliminary task as you can see I used the entire picture on the front cover and didn’t even cut out the back ground.

On the front cover of my preliminary task the proto I used of a year 7 is positioned very low on the page, this makes the magazine background take up a lot of room as I haven’t zoomed it in to fit properly. Also it is out of proportion as I zoomed the picture in and didn’t hold down shift so it was stretched wider than it should have been, making the model look big. The mast head is also very low on the page and in the middle which is not following the codes and conventions of magazines. In my full product I have my mast head in the top left corner, this makes the product look more professional as it looks like a general magazine and not amateur. Furthermore, I have sell lines across my models face in my preliminary task and underneath that I have bullet points on my front cover. This does not look good compared to my full product which has the sell lines underneath the models or on their body’s not their faces. This was easier to do because I had my models further up on the page rather than low down and they were photo shopped so fit better on the page.  Also, my preliminary task also has other photos on the front cover, whereas my full product has a button with text in. This makes it look more mature as I haven’t used blurry pictures or not photo shopped images on top of another image used as the main picture. The text I used on my preliminary task was in many different fonts and colours which does not follow the codes and conventions of magazines. On the other hand my full product used a few main fonts and 3 colours. This makes it look professional and like a proper magazine.

Moving on to my contents page, my preliminary task again used photos which were not photo shopped and of poor quality. This shows how my photo shop skills have improved and my eye for a good photo. Also the pictures are now relevant to the text on the page rather than just random pictures. In addition, my contents page contains text, this is all in different styles and looks very plain. In my final task I have used paragraph styles, this makes my contents page look more consistent and therefore the overall style is better. I have also used white text with an outline on a white background, this means it doesn’t stand out at all. On my final product I have used text which is consistent in the colour scheme and stands out to my audience. The overall layout of my magazine has also improved, it is no longer just a few lines, it has pictures which identify with the text and is all in line rather than little bits sticking out. Also the page numbers in my preliminary task only go up to 6, this is not enough for a real magazine so in my full task I have put numbers up to 120. This shows how my knowledge of magazines and constructing one has improved.

To compare the two products further, I have improved my content by having double page spreads and an article in my full product rather than just a front cover and contents page. The makes the product more realistic and professional. The use of columns in my final products also shows how my skills and knowledge has developed as I did not know how to do this in my preliminary task. I have also photo shopped images and learnt how to edit text so I have some that is bold and some that stands out more through making certain parts bigger than others. I have also learnt how to caption pictures so they have more meaning and the reader know why they are there. I also learnt how to use shortcuts in InDesign to make my production a lot faster, for example, Ctrl+[ was send backward rather than having to right click>arrange>send backwards. This sped up the making of my magazine a lot and also the short cut of Ctrl+z to undo when I went wrong to undo. Overall, my knowledge and understanding of InDesign improved a lot, also my skill of Photoshop and InDesign and other media based programmes improved a lot.