What I learnt from my preliminary project …

I felt that I picked up some vital skills whilst completing the preliminary project which I carried on to use in my final product these consisted of …

I also learnt that not just age and gender of your target audience should be taken into account but also a full Psychographic profile should be compiled, and ideally you should have an image in your head of how a reader of your product would look, what their interests are, pretty much everything about them - as to fully understand their needs and expectations of your product.

I feel the preliminary coursework gave me a greater awareness of how consideration of the target audience determines the outcome of decisions made during the production process. For example if you are concentrating on a younger audience the layout/colour scheme/fonts/cinematography would have to connote fun and portray a fresh, new image.In addition if you are targeting an older audience more conventions should be followed as to deliver to their expectations.

Audience …

Also from this project I realised the importance of planning and learnt that, as soon as you have a deadline, planning should start – building up a creative plan so you have a clear image in your head of exactly what are aiming for. I think this was a weakness of my preliminary project as I wasn’t sure of how I wanted it to look and sort of ‘ made it up as I went along!’ So from that I knew for this final project that I had to have a clear plans and aims.

Planning and

preparation …

Also I felt that my organisation of time in the preliminary project could have been improved as there seemed to be a big rush to finish in the last few days we had. By making the time plan for this project I felt I learnt from this and used my time well as I was clear of what I was doing each lesson and finished with plenty of time to spare!

Time …

Creativity …

I feel I now have more realistic creative ideas. In the preliminary project I think I did not have as many initial ideas for what I wanted my magazine to look like as I didn’t think I would be able to put them into practice. I didn’t have such a wide knowledge of what the technology was capable of so was afraid to come up with anything too difficult.

However for this project I came up with a lot of initial plans and finally had a picture in my head of how I wanted it to look. My final product is roughly what I was intending with the odd adjustment.