Gresa Zariqi

Wednesday, 13 April 2016

Friday, 25 March 2016

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

Reviewing the production of the preliminary tasks, (this was the area that changed the most).I showed changes in the technology I used as this massively impacts the finished products. For the preliminary task I worked on PowerPoint, this really limited the creativity I could have shown for my school magazine products. The colours I used were really vivid and unappealing, it didn’t flow. It’s clear to see that there was no thought process to what colours I was using; it was all just put onto page. I used fonts and images that didn’t entirely correspond. I showed no skills as I didn’t edit the images. Another aspect that lacked professionalism was the environment of where I chose to take the images. The images were just taken within school grounds therefore again limiting how unique my preliminary task turned out to be. Also the cover lines have a lot of space in between each one, this made the page seem really basic and boring.

Looking back at the title for my school magazine I named it ‘’Discover Hampz’’, I just created a word that I thought would appeal the most to the audience, I don’t share the same opinion looking back now. It’s quite childish and informal especially since the magazine would have been aimed at a target audience of students that are much more mature (even parents). I also feel that there was again not much thought put into the title, the font is just a plain white thick font which again lacks excitement and creativity. The contents page was extremely boring too, the photos used were basic and took up the majority of the page, and the summaries were left with a small corner of the page. This defocuses and takes away from the actual purpose behind a contents page. The preliminary task overall just looks boring and silly.

Moving onto my actual magazine production I spent more time and devoted myself to creating the perfect few pages of a magazine from a genre that I feel I can genuinely relate too. I chose to work with the Indie Pop genre due to listening to an artist (Banks in particular) nearly every day. She was the only one that calmed me down and the only artist who didn’t end up giving me a headache. I felt like I had a connection to the artist, as well as other artists within the genre and therefore could create something that would appeal to the target audience. I spent time researching, looking at interviews, taking images that could be worthy of putting in a magazine and hours on Photoshop editing, making changes , altering simple things and adding detail every time. This allowed me to create the perfect magazine, front cover, contents page and double page spread as oppose to the preliminary tasks that were created very quickly, on PowerPoint and not much thought or effort was put into it.

Using Photoshop allowed me to create more unique designs for example the title, the different images and brushes used to have a larger impact. I adjusted the backgrounds, removed them, and adjusted the brightness and hue/saturations. I used the brush tool to colour in the backgrounds in different colours to show experimentation. I kept making vast changes to my final product such as using textured backgrounds after being told my contents page looked ‘quite flat’. There was no dimension to them at first, this changed and I created something completely different. Whereas for the preliminary task the lack of feedback held me back from making changes or seeing what needed to desperately be improved. The title I used for my magazine ‘Sanity’ shows a thought process, a huge development and has an actual idea or theory behind it as oppose to ‘Discover Hampz’.Again for my final product I kept making changes to the title too, trying different colours and fonts and choosing the final one based on feedback.

Another massive change between the preliminary task and the final product was the language I used. I feel that for my final product I used more formal language and words that appealed to the audience more. I incorporated the lessons we had on editor’s letters and emotive & colloquial language when creating the cover lines or writing the interview. I also researched what sort of language was being used by other music magazines such as Q, NME or even Kerrang!. The language used for my preliminary front cover and contents pages was quite informal; I didn’t use any words or phrases that would attract my audience deeply.

From completing this task I have learned how important paying attention to detail is, how beneficial the idea of ‘trial and error’ is to the magazine industry and how much time consuming the tasks are. I also learnt how patient you have to be and that time should be spent researching in order to really understand the genre you are working in. This then aids you into completing the task with a product that has the full potential of fitting into the media industry perfectly.

Evaluation Question : 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Example;

To create my title and to make it perfect it did take some work on photoshop. I put this cropped alpha wave into photoshop.

I adjusted the size of the image, holding down 'shift' key whilst the image was selected on 'free transform'. This prevents me from adjusting the pixels and squashing the image. I clicked the arrow to place the image and ensured to have a black background to see what i was doing more clearly.

I then made a copy of what was on photoshop by 'selecting all', 'edit- copy', 'edit -paste'. This creates a new layer. I did this so i could directly edit the image. Using the 'magic wand' tool I then selected the background of 'Layer 1' and clicked delete,to get rid of the white background and so i was just left with the red waves. I felt the lines were too harsh, i used the 'refine edge' option and smoothed out any harsh or pixelated areas. This gave me a much cleaner, neater wave.

I needed to change the colour of my wave, I wanted it to be black so it would apply to the rest of my front cover. I did this by clicking the 'color overlay' option and selecting the 'solid fill' colour as 'black'.

I wanted to make the title stand out more as it was not visible on my cover as my cover background is black too. After researching and watching some youtube tutorials I came across the option of selecting an 'outer glow'. This created an outline that was easily adjustable and not as bold. It's opacity was something I could experience with. By selecting the ' outer glow tool' I chose the colour grey to have around the black wave. This made the title more interesting, more visually appealing. The outer glow opacity and colour is something I experimented with and changed quite frequently in order to find the perfect match for my front cover. Choosing a grey 'outer glow' allowed me to then incorporate grey fonts into my front cover as well.

This was the final outcome: I was pleased and happy with this outcome. I received the opinions of friends as well as family whom agreed with me.

Using the text-box tool I then added text over the grey wave. I wrote down 'SANITY' using the 'Niagara Solid Regular' font and chose the font 'size 160'. I felt this was slightly small, so I then selected the 'free transform' tool and expanded the text. Again holding down the 'Shift' key to prevent the text from stretching out.This was to make sure the title stood out and captured the attention of the target audience. Also after researching other magazines within my genre of Indie Pop/ PBR&B,I realised that the titles were usually quite large too therefore I decided to adapt this technique for my magazine too to help appeal and allow easy memorisation of the magazine and raise the chances of it being recognised by the target audience and those whom may find the magazine interesting.

I then saved this in the 'JPEG format' and cropped the title.This was then copied out onto my front cover window. The cropped title was saved as an image and then added onto the window where I was editing my front cover. I used the 'free transform' tool once again to adjust the size of the image to fit the screen and fill in the space on my front cover. I also used the 'brush tool' in a very small size, using the colour 'black' to smudge out and rough edges around the title to help blend it in properly.