At the beginning of the year we began by completing our preliminary task in which we had to create a magazine for our school consisting of a front page and contents page. There is a very prominent difference in the two magazines and it clearly shows how my skills have developed over the time period.
The first thing we had to do was take some photos. Unlike my actual magazine, I did not plan a photo shoot and simply did it in lesson time. Although I did borrow some props from the drama department, the models and I were dressed in our normal clothes so it did not attract a specific audience in any way on that basis. In total we took about 40 photos, 10 of which we were able to use. This was completely different to when I did the photo shoot for my magazine. It was planned and booked, I drew up sketches of the pages so I knew what photos to take, I got my model to come in from outside of school and took careful consideration of my audience whilst deciding outfits, props, hair and makeup. Also, in total I took about 300 photos for my real magazine so I had plenty to choose from and this allowed me to be more adventurous with my pages and images. As I pre-booked my photo shoot, it allowed me to concentrate and plan more so I can get the best possible product. One idea of which was the t-shirt that I created which I was unable to do in my preliminary task.
I created the school magazine on Photoshop and the music magazine on InDesign. InDesign was new software to me but was very easy to grasp the concept of; it allowed us to create more effective/realistic looking pages especially for our double page spreads as it is far easier to text wrap and add images. Although Photoshop works to create magazines, InDesign is a more technical programme used by professionals which obviously increased my overall skills using media software.
Whilst creating my school magazine I used past knowledge of Photoshop and didn’t really experiment with anything new therefore making it to look very plain and basic. All of the text was in the same font and size and I only used blue and yellow for the entire magazine which, because of the photo, was hard to read. Again, comparing this to my final magazine is a big difference. I carefully chose all of the colours and they were all chosen to fit with the style and the audience of the magazine so they look very effective. I then went on a font downloader website and searched for a specific font that again would fit the style of my magazine and appeal to the audience rather than using the premade fonts available.
Creating my music magazine has also furthered my knowledge and skills of editing photos including cutting out the background and adding tints etc to get a better overall image. On Photoshop I have been able to use slight airbrushing tools which I didn’t on my school magazine; this gave the images a better look and would appear more attractive and appeal more to my audience. I’ve also been able to change the brightness/contrast etc so I can add a ‘mood’ to the photo and the overall magazine.
There is no real structure or layout to my school magazine and everything seems to have been just placed there for no actual reason. The comparison between just the two contents pages (school-single page/ music-double page) portrays the overall magazine in itself; the music magazine contains a lot more content and looks very realistic in comparison to the school magazine which has 12 stories and doesn’t look in any way attractive. My music magazine contents have been split into boxes which give everything a place and look very neat, tidy and organised. My school magazine is the complete opposite.
Overall, my skills have been developed throughout the process of making the magazine as I experimented much more with different effects and styles to give a better appearance.
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