Evaluation Draft

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression

from it to the full product?

Since my preliminary task, I feel like I have learnt a lot on how to successfully create a magazine. For my preliminary task, I created a magazine for my school which included a cover page and a contents page. When I created this in September, I created a simple magazine name, used a main cover image and sell lines. However now that I look back at them I feel like I could improve them so they looked professional. At the time, I didn’t take into account the type of font I was using or the size therefore I feel as though the layout didn’t look right, especially on my cover page. However for my music magazine, I took into account the layout and tried to make it look as professional as I could by the selection of tools I used on InDesign. The guide lines and columns helped me achieved this however I failed to use these for my preliminary task.

 Although I thought the contents page for my preliminary task looked much better than the cover page, I still feel my full product looks a lot more effective and more like a realistic magazine. This is because the overall look and different conventions I included were more suited to my audience such as the headings, the editor’s note and the wide selection of interesting images. Even simple things such as the font and house style made my final product look better therefore my overall progress was more recognisable. I’ve learnt about what is typically seen in a music magazine and while researching my audience I have considered what I will include in my own music magazine. I felt like I considered my audience a lot more when creating my final product as this is shown through the type of style my music magazine is.

 During this project, I have also gained a lot of skills on how to use particular software and what to expect when creating music magazines. This is because I used a wider variety of tools in my final product such as learning how to create different paragraph styles, how to change the style of the text and also how to wrap it around images. I feel this has given my final product an overall more professional look; making it look more like a realistic magazine. However, during the making of my preliminary task I didn’t change the style of the text as much, keeping it quite basic and simple. I didn’t include any different paragraph styles and when it came down to the layout, I kept everything very simple.

 For my preliminary task I also feel the images I used weren’t very interesting and the different shots and angles weren’t taken into consideration as I didn’t think they were important. On the other hand, now I realise that having a good set of images plays a big role into the production of your magazine and are one of the main aspects when looking at how realistic and successful your magazine is.  For my final product I also used a much better camera, allowing the pictures I took to be in seen in high quality on my music magazine. This wasn’t the case for my preliminary task however as I used the camera on my phone, rather than using a professional camera that is vital to use in photo shoots for real life magazines. Without  a doubt, the images I took for my final product were much more entertaining as the facial expressions and clothes my model wore were very unusual which helped engaged the audience more, unlike the first set of photos I used for the school magazine.

  I also planned by music magazine a lot more than my first school magazine I produced. I was given a lot more time to organise and think of interesting and new ideas that I could use in my final product. In this time I was able to draw rough sketches of what my final magazine might look like, come up with different name ideas for the magazine using different name categories and think of my own colour scheme that I would use for my house style. All of this made it a lot easier to create my final magazine instead of having to come up with lots of random ideas on the spot without much time and thought.

Another skill I gained was researching real music magazines, whether this is researching the cover pages, the contents pages or the articles. For my preliminary task I failed to do this therefore my end result looked very unrealistic. Yet, when I looked at magazines such a ‘Q’, ‘NME and ‘Kerrang’, this helped be a lot when starting to think of ideas for my own music magazine. This way I was able to think of a similar layout and style and also make sure I included every type of convention that was necessary to create a favourable looking magazine.

 In conclusion, it is clear that I have made a lot of progress in both the planning and the making of my final magazine and you can see this by looking at the differences between my preliminary task and my final task. This obviously was helped a lot by researching my type of magazine as well as the various skills I learnt throughout the project.