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

Since creating my College Magazine, I know that both my academic skills and my creative skills have improved greatly.

Over the duration of this project I have learnt a lot of academic skills linked to media audiences, representation, genres and stereotypes’ design processes and layouts. Before the start of this project, I only had a brief understanding of representation and what it meant. Whilst completing my magazines, I learnt in great detail what representation is and why it is important when creating media products, as how a product is chosen to be represented links to its audience and whether or not it is successful. I have also learnt that a lot of research is needed to specifically create a product which will satisfy its intended target audience. I learnt that feedback from the audience is vital to ensure that the media product being created, in my case the music magazine, is continuing to link to my target audience and chosen theme as it can be easy to divert and begin to take the magazine in another direction. An example of this is when I was choosing the colours for my magazines theme. I found a nice selection of colours which personally I really liked, however, I did not use them in the end as they did not clearly link to my theme or represent my genre or target audience. And I got to understand how important planning is as without pre-production plans it would be difficult to know what could potentially be a very good design idea or what could actually turn out to be unsuccessful. Creatively, also think that my design skills have improved, especially my design skills using software applications such as PhotoShop and InDesign. At the beginning of this unit of work, I had a very little knowledge and experience in using PhotoShop, and I had never used InDesign before. So I felt a bit nervous when creating my magazine pages, however, as the construction process went on I began to feel a lot more confident with my design choices and what I had to do in order to achieve the result which I wanted. If I ever need to use PhotoShop or InDesign in the future, I will feel a lot more confident and less nervous to tackle the challenge but I know there are still lots of skills which I haven’t learnt whilst making my magazines.

Comparing my preliminary task, my College Magazine, to my main task, my Music Magazine:

My College Magazine and Music Magazine Front Cover Comparisons-

Puff: The puff on my college magazine is relevant to the theme of the issue as the colours match as well as the leaf shape being appropriate for the season. However, it looks out of place as the font on it really doesn’t match the rest of the front cover. The puff on my music magazine stands out much more and helps balance out the shapes on the page. It also helps make the front cover exciting.

Cover Lines: Even though the main cover lines are positioned in a similar way on black banners on both of my magazines, my music magazine looks a lot more exciting thanks to the graphics I added underneath. The cover lines on the right hand side of my music magazine also look better as the added graphics makes them more noticeable. The cover lines on the college magazine are actually quite messy as the letters in each of them are slightly different sizes.

Front Cover Photo: I think the photos I took for both the magazines were good for the front covers and achieve what I wanted them to do, grab my target audience’s attention. However, I think the photo I took for the college magazine is actually better as it is more exciting as it has a background relevant to the magazine. My music magazine front cover image is nice but does follow normal magazine conventions which makes it less exciting.

Masthead: My music magazine masthead is a lot better than my college magazine masthead. My music magazines name is relevant to the magazine as well as looks exciting and fits well with the masthead design. My college magazine name is simple, and the use of colour and a drop shadow doesn’t really help to make it any more exciting.

My College Magazine and Music Magazine Contents Page Comparisons-

Photos: Even though I used more photos on my college magazine contents page, I think the use of less photos works better. My music magazine looks a lot neater and more organised and it’s easy to tell which photos link to what articles, and the folios are easy to decipher. I could have used half the amount of photos on my college magazine contents page, as for two of the articles I included two photos which are very similar. This looks boring and unexciting and would not draw in an audience. The photos on my music magazine contents are all very different which males the whole page more exciting.

Colours: My music magazine has a clear colour scheme, which links to the puff on the front cover. Even though there is a clear colour scheme on the front cover of my college magazine, it is not continued very well on the contents page.

Layout and Text: The layout of my music magazine is much more detailed and organised than on my college magazine. My college magazine is extremely basic. It is also hard to tell which pictures are linked or not, and what page and article they relate to. My music magazine contents page is a lot better as it is very easy to identify which photos belong to which articles and also what page to find them on. Also, my music magazine separates the articles into different categories and gives a little introduction to the article which gets the reader engaged. The layout of the college magazine is just flat and looks really boring and un-engaging. Also, the text in the music magazine varies which makes it exciting, and the fonts are clear and easy to read. The text on my college magazine is all the same and difficult to read.