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

Technologies

Building my media product; (A music magazine) I have learnt a great deal about technologies, and the building of my product has immeasurably aided and enhance my media product. It would not have been the same, had I been without it. During the process I regularly blogged on the development and so in this question I will refer to these blog entries and make use of the print screens in hand.

Technologies Used To build my product I used a number of different technologies.

Needless to say, I’ve used a computer but I have created a list below comprising of the other technologies I made use of for the whole task.

Digital Camera Printer Adobe Photoshop Internet Explorer Blogger (Blogging website) Microsoft Word Microsoft Powerpoint Adobe InDesign

Digital SLR Camera

I used a camera to take the pictures I needed for my magazine, Using an SLR provided very helpful as it was of much better quality. Also the fact that it was a digital camera rather than a traditional one meant that I can see what I had taken. The masses of memory meant I could store all the high quality pictures I had taken. Because I could see what I’d taken was very useful as I knew if I was on the right lines to what I envisioned, it also made it easier to tell whether the shot I had taken was good or if I had to redo one on the spot so it saved a lot of time.

This camera has taught me a bunch of things: How to use it, and also the how to make use of the features of the camera, for different photographs. You can see the type of shots I had taken with this camera here.

Adobe PhotoshopPhotoshop is an image manipulation program, that allows me to alter images. It was extremely useful in the development of my product and it made me make a double page spread like no other, it also helped make my front cover stand out and allowed me to remove the unnecessary backgroundFor example in my double page spread I had an article about a rappers album, it included the album artwork and to make that: I used three images of one model, doing three poses, I had removed the background, blackened two images and then greyed out the third, I had also inserted a new background to match with the persona and I had inserted new fonts to go altogether with my product. You can see my artwork in the next slide.

Photoshop

Photoshop

Here is a print screen of me putting the background on

Photoshop

Here you can see me blackening out the images so you can’t see anything apart from the outline, I did this as it was part of an artistic choice I envisioned.

Photoshop

Here you can see I have desaturated the middle image, this is to grey the image out so now all we can see is different shades of grey depicting the real colours. I have done this to make the middle stand out from the rest as I think it’s the best image.

Internet Explorer

The internet was very helpful during this project, not only during the research section but also through the building of the blog which enabled me to document the work that I’d done.

The internet was extremely helpful during the research stage as it enabled me to look into the forms and conventions of a magazine and do some basic research on magazines before I went to look at three during my detailed research.

Microsoft Office - Word

Microsoft word has allowed me to answer a few of my tasks in such a professional and efficient way.

It enabled me to prepare the written feature of my double page spread and also allowed me to draft my blog posts.

Microsoft Office - Powerpoint

Powerpoint has been very, very useful during the building of my project. It has allowed me to answer the evaluation questions.

I’ve learnt that this program helps make the slides look more interesting, not only for the ability to add different types of multimedia including images and movies, but also because people have to interact with the slide to read more and are therefore more engaged.

Overall technology has been a great help with all the tasks. It’s clear that technology was used for every aspect of it: For the images, editing, and PowerPoint's.

It has helped me create a front cover, double page spread and a contents page in such a way; my whole magazine would have been very different if I hadn’t used any technology.