Preliminary Task to Actual Magazine:

My Progression

Mastheads

As you can probably see, there has been a big improvement regarding the two magazine mastheads. I found out how to employ more effects for my music magazine masthead; I included a drop shadow and an inner shadow and used a better font. With my prelim masthead, I was oblivious to all these effects and so the masthead looks pretty basic. I think this is one of the biggest improvements I have seen.

Front Cover

The front covers are so different and I think there are visible improvements. I think one change is the use of colour. Some of the colours I use on my prelim cover are quite different and don’t fit together as well as they could. There are also issues regarding colours not standing out against the image. I think with the strong colours used on my music magazine cover stand out much better from the background image and the text is a much better size and therefore more visible to the audience. I think I’ve also been more imaginative with shapes; for example, the ‘no entry’ sign which acts as a background for the competition information. Saying this, there are similarities with the layout because what hasn't changed, is that I want the cover to be under-crowded and easily readable. I think that overall the cover looks much more professional and stands out much better than the school magazine cover. I’m happy about this because I like to see that I have made some improvement.

ImagesI think the image on the cover of my music magazine is much more interesting because the pose is something unique and different whereas the image on the cover of my school magazine is more straight-forward and slightly unimaginative. The cover is the thing that the audience will see first so I realised from my prelim that I needed to think hard about the image I would use for my cover. It was a similar story for the contents page. I found that both of the smaller images on the contents page of the school magazine were quite boring because they were very basic so Idecided that for my music magazine I wanted to be more imaginative with poses and therefore follow the conventions of real music magazines. As you can see, there has been a big improvement image-wise from my prelim task to my actual magazine. I think that when I looked back at my prelim, I was able to see where the weak areas were and I was therefore able to improve for my music magazine.

Contents Page

To some extents, the contents pages are very similar. I kept the same layout because I thought it made the page look spacious and organised. There are numerous elements that have improvements, however. One thing that I think has definitely improved is the page heading because on my prelim contents page, the word ‘Contents’ is very small which it shouldn’t be seeing as it is the second most important page in any magazine. I also found that the sub-section headings were very small and it’s vital they are clear because they allow readers to navigate through the magazine. I think also with my music magazine, it is easier to distinguish between the article headings, the summaries and the page numbers as they are in different colours whereas, with my prelim, they are all in black which makes them harder to see. On my music magazine contents pages, I also included an editorial, which I found from my research, is very important as it’s a chance to communicate with the audience. One thing I didn’t do on my prelim was include a web address on the page which I should have done. Because I missed things out like this in the prelim, I was able to remember to include them in my music magazine which is where they really count.

Overall...

I think I have progressed massively over the past few months from the creation of my preliminary task to the creation of my actual music magazine. I feel that I was able to pick up important things through the creation of my prelim task which allowed me to make my music magazine a stronger piece of work. I feel I have learnt so much and will be able to use what I have learnt in future tasks similar to this.I think my understanding of photography, layout and modes of address has definitely improved and that has allowed me to make my music magazine much better and a piece of work that I am very proud of.