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

In the preliminary Task, my audience was a lot more specific then it was for the main task. For the Preliminary task, it was very simple - College Students where my audience, and being one, it was very easy to ask people what they would look for in a college magazine (If they were interested in buying it. However, for the Main task, my magazine has a lot of influence from "Vibe" magazine, with my target audience being Male 15-30 year old's, mostly aspirers.

I created all my products using Adobe Photoshop Cs4. When I started creating my products for the Preliminary task, I had a very ,very basic knowledge of Photoshop, since i had used it before, but had never been capable of producing anything remotely close to being good. When making my College magazine cover/contents page, I learnt the very important basics such as how to use Layers, selecting the right tools at the right time, and various shortcuts such as pressing "Enter" after transforming an object, and Ctrl+T to re-size the object in the first place.

Once of the most important things I learned was how to fade out the edge of images. To do this, I took either the elliptical, or rectangular marquee tool, and draw on your image. You then click Add layer mask, and click Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. I founded out many tricks such as this by simply going onto Google, or working it out for myself via Trial and Error. After making the Preliminary products, I also had a much wider knowledge of the fonts I could use, which helped me greatly when deciding upon fonts to use for my Final Products. I also tried out many of the "blending options" (By right Clicking the layer) which also helped me with basic effects such as Shadows, glows and Gradient Overlays.

I also very quickly learn that I needed to use a much better camera. In the preliminary task, the pictures were taken on my phone, which has an okay camera, but no-where near good enough to be blown up onto an A4 page. For the Main task, I used an Olympus SLR camera, which had a significantly better quality and was more than capable of taking pictures at the high quality which I needed.

As well as a better camera and more Photoshop knowledge, I also had much better planning and research for my Main Task than I did in my Preliminary. My prelinary was essentially an experiment, and was not specifically based of any magazine - just general ideas I had gathered from magazines I had read in the past. With my Main Task, I looked at quite a few magazines aimed at a similar target audience to grasp a good idea on how the magazine should look. I looked at and Xbox magazine, since is will be aimed at a similar, young audience, and I looked at Vibe, since it has a very similar audience and a similar music genre. By doing this, I had a good idea of what my magazine should look like in terms of organization and amount of colours.

Here is what my original front Cover looked like. To start with I was pleased with it, but after looking at it (And other magazines) more, I decided it needed some changed. I thought this particular version did not look as organized as my current version, and had to much empty space on it. I also thought It need a darker photo to ensure that the text stood out more. I addressed both these issues to eventually make my Final cover (See Above).

Other things I learned within Photoshop were things such as how to use rulers, and the "paragraph" options for editing text spacing. Rulers were particularly important for creating my Feature Article, since I added a ruler line down the middle to act as the middle of the gap between the two pages. This allowed me to align my Feature Article properly so it would work as a double page (A3) spread in a magazine. Learning about the paragraph options was also very important. These options allow you to change the horizontal and vertical spacing between letters and words. The default Vertical space is very large, and decreasing this space gives a much more professional look, particularly with larger writing, such as contents page headings or cover titles. This is something I did not do in my Preliminary task. If you look on both front Covers, you will see that Dubbed's cover titles have a small vertical spacing, whereas the cover titles on 'Enorf' have a large vertical spacing (see Above).