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

Front Cover

Contents

Double page

What I have learnt – Front Cover

• I have learnt that the less is more.• For example on my College magazine I used a lot of colours as it would be more visually

appealing and fun as the audience is 16-18 year olds at College but for my music magazine I had to make it more mature as my audience is 16-25 year olds and therefore I used only three main colours.

• I think by using less colours its definitely more attractive as its more mature and sophisticated which emphasizes the sophistication of RnB as a genre.

What I have learnt - Contents• How to use InDesign confidently – Biggest achievement was

creating the ‘R’ in the background. I think it looked really effective and was a progression from my College magazine as I never used any effects on my College magazine.

• Less is more – The contents page looks mature and classy as the colour scheme is simple yet attractive and appealing.

• I have learnt how to use InDesign much better which has enabled me to use different effects such as drop box shadows on my images to make them stand out. I have also learnt how to import different fonts such as the font I have used from dafont.com, instead of using the ones already provided which is what I used on my college magazine. This shows my progression.

• I have also learnt how to make things neater, for example on my College magazine, text is overlapping onto the box its in and the box lines are visible.

• Whereas on my Music magazine, the text is in a box but you cant see the lines of the box and the text is situated neatly inside it. This makes the magazine look tidy and orderly and shows my

development from the preliminary task.

What I have learnt – Double page spread

• Obviously, I have learnt how to create a double page spread as my College magazine never had one.

Creating the double page spread

• To make the double page spread I had to use InDesign to add and conjoin two pages together, as shown below.

Firstly, I clicked ‘Allow pages to shuffle’ which meant that I could start to move the pages in the order I wanted them.

Then once they were able to shuffle around I dragged the page that I wanted to be next to each other and made sure that the thick, black line as shown below was joining the two pages together. This linked the pages.

• Because I had never made a double page spread before, it meant that I had to research and analyse double page spreads from similar RnB magazines.

• I have learnt how to use Photoshop and InDesign to create the spread and how to make it conform to the conventions of similar double page spreads such as the interview separated into columns, the interviewers name – ‘Written by ..’, photography recognition- ‘Photos by ..’, quotations from interview, stand first and images.

Stand first

Columns

Written by

Images

Photos by

Overall • In conclusion I think that I have progressed very far from my College

magazine.• I have learnt how to use Photoshop more successfully by using

tools such as outer glow, magic wand and creating shapes. • I also think that I have become more organised when using

PhotoShop as at the start I had un used layers as I wasn’t sure how to add or delete them, so by learning from my mistakes I am now very organised in making the layout by using layers more efficiently and neatly.

• I have also learnt how to use InDesign to the best of its advantage but doing new things that I didn’t know before such as making drop shadows and altering the transparency of texts.

• I have enjoyed this task and feel that I have progressed so much from my College magazine to making a professional looking Music Magazine.