Evaluation Question 7

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

 Since starting this magazine project I have developed a knowledge and deeper understanding of many different aspects within the magazine industry, these being:

To begin we started learning about the basic magazine conventions and of course the magazine industry. My basic knowledge on this was very varied, but I began to understand terms like circulation, revenue streams, socio-economic groups etc. I learnt that when it comes to making a magazine, it was a lot more complex then what I first thought. There were many things to consider, to begin there was the basics for example layouts, colour schemes, fonts, housestyles. But then I began to realise that there were more aspects that would affect my magazine. The target audience would contribute greatly to my final product, and the importance of the content itself I had hugely underestimated. 

 The content had to not only constitute that of a real music magazine, but it also had to reflect my genre. It was much harder coming up with all my content that I had ever thought it would be. In terms of managing my time, this took me a lot longer then expected and could have hindered the rest of my work. In general I spent much longer on actually creating my final product then on both my research and planning and my evaluations. This wasn't a good decision as my research would hugely influence and benefit my magazine and the quality of the product.

In this post I have shown both my Preliminary Task and finished task, in order to show my improvement of skills. We can first look at the photos. The photos on my finished product are of much better quality, the lighting makes the picture a lot bolder and more proffessional looking and of course my skills in using technology have developed. Adobe Photoshop has been the main programme I have used, I had no previous knowledge of the programme before I started using it for this project and I feel I have really progressed in my use of such technologies. 

In order to capture my target audience and achieve all the standards set by the project I knew I would have to work at getting the best picture possible. I looked at the composition of my photos alongside the lighting and the spacing etc.

Decision making was a large part of my task, there were lots of difficult decisions to make. For example I had to choose my housestyle, which included fonts, colours, layouts etc. Obviously these had to be related to my genre and model etc. My decisions all also had to be linked to my time keeping. Time keeping had a major role within the development of my project

In order to get feedback from my audience I thought it would be a great idea to make an online poll. Throughout my blog I have videos and rhetorical questions that get the audience involved but I thought this would be one step further into engaging my blog readers. This way readers got to actually help influence the final piece. I've also recorded and included audience feedback throughout in order to show how their comments and creative criticisms have helped to form my magazine.