The image to the left is my preliminary task school magazine front cover and on the right is my final product of my music magazine front cover.
Looking at this task I am finding it quite hard to compare the 2 covers because they are for 2 completely different genres so they are aimed at different audiences therefore designed in different ways but overall I am a lot happier with the look of my main task than my preliminary task and it also demonstrates what an improvement I've made through learning new techniques and 'playing around' with Pixlr.
Looking back at my preliminary task I didn't use any sell lines or any picture effects as such because I had not learnt my print media definitions yet in order to put them into practice and this was before we started our research part of the course so I had very little knowledge of magazines. I also find that I didn't use the space on my preliminary front cover very effectively because the picture I used was so large I only had space to put the name and some 'advertising' facts to promote the school so on my front cover for my main task I made sure that I used the space more wisely buy making sure I was able to add things like sell lines, a bar-code and other information such as the issue number and website which proves that I used the space more effectively.
I don't think I took anywhere as much care and dedication on my preliminary task as I did in my main task which is reflected in the quality of products which proves the more time you spend on a product, the better the quality is.
On my preliminary task I used my friend John as my model because I know that it was guaranteed that he would be free to do that however for my main task I used another friend, Aaron because I realised that these are 2 very reliable people that I could count on I did not realise this at first which is why on the day where I was going to take my photos I let 4 potential models know about this so I would have a bigger chance of at least one of them showing up. Luckily they all came so I got to choose which one I wanted which was fortunate for me. In terms of wearing crazy outfits or make-up I decided not to use that because I wanted quite a naturalistic front cover. The only extra that I used was a bow tie!
In my preliminary task, we were told to create a front cover and a contents page, however, in the main task we had to create a double page spread as well. So whereas, I'd had experience in creating a front cover and contents page before, it was a completely new experience creating a double page spread. I found creating the double page spread the most difficult thing because I had never done that before and I also found it difficult trying to find a topic for my DPS so after discussing this with my teacher I decided to do an article which would also include the audience by using words such as 'we' and 'our'.
The programme I used for my preliminary task was Adobe Photoshop CS3 extended edition however I found that I could not get used to it and found that I was not enjoying using this program which is why my first task isn't as high quality because I just found this software very difficult to use probably because I had no previous experience of using it and had no time to thoroughly get used to it. However I was so relieved to have found pixlr to to create my main task on and over time of using it I have fallen in love with it because it is so accessible to use and therefore I feel that my main task looks a lot better than my preliminary! At first I had some problems with saving because I lost quite a bit of work at first because it saved in weird places or just didn't save for some reason but once I got to grips with saving my work in a certain place then backing it up on my memory stick I found the programme a lot more convenient. Also through watching tutorial videos on youtube I became so used to the programme that I learned some keyboard shortcuts which made my work a lot easier saved my time not having to go through all the drop down menus.
I found that doing the preliminary task very useful for a variety of reasons the main reason being that I discovered how I would not want my music magazine to look therefore causing myself to find a style that I liked and would therefore use. Another thing that I learnt is that even though I gave myself plenty of time to finish my magazine and all my research, I need to learn not to leave things to the last minute (e.g. parts of the evaluation) because that cause you to make mistakes therefore losing marks.
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