Evaluation Question 7

Look back at your preliminary task. What have you learnt in the progression from it to the full product?


From the preliminary task to the music magazine, I have learnt a lot of new skills and improved at those I already knew.

Time management

When making my preliminary magazine, I found that towards the end of the deadline I rushed to complete it as I had not put enough work into the product in the first few weeks. I took that into consideration when making my music magazine and managed my time much more efficiently. I found that it was most time efficient to develop my product and then blog about what I had done rather than leave the blogging all to the end; this also kept me organised and meant I knew what I was working on each lesson.

Developing skills

Throughout the course I have learnt many new skills. This includes my researching skills as I believe research for my music magazine was much more thorough than it had been for my school magazine. I benefitted from this as I constantly knew how I wanted my magazine to look from ideas from my research. Furthermore, on my first magazine I researched magazines but did not compare them very well to find similarities and traits that were constantly used. On my music magazine I compared my research to discover common fonts and layout styles which helped me develop my magazine. I have also found out a lot more about magazine designs and the different styles (e.g. rocky/ pop) which I used to create the right image for my own magazine.

I have also learnt about new computer software. When making my preliminary task, I was introduced to blogger, photoshop and indesign. As these programmes were very new to me, I found them quite hard to use and remember all the different features, however, when I began my music magazine I was much more confident in using them and have learnt different features, which I believe is reflected in my work. Using blogger I have learnt how to make labels and add animations, amongst other things while in photoshop I have learnt how to make a magazine and add text etc. rather than making it on indesign. Out of all of the new computer progammes, I believe I have learnt the most about photoshop. One of the tools I have found the most useful and used throughout is the lasso tool as this allows you to change/remove different parts of the image, without the rest of it being affected. I have therefore used it to change lighting in parts of an image, remove backgrounds and change eye colour.

Throughout the course of making my magazines, I took various photographs which I used a canon eos 7D camera for. I was knew to this camera which has lots of features and so found it very confusing but by the time I did photoshoots for my music magazines I was much more familiar with it and so took better pictures where I focused on the lighting/shadowing and angles of the image. This made the final outcomes more professional. Furthermore, I planned various outfits, rather than using just one as I did on my preliminary task which was successful as after looking back I decided some of the outfits did not suit the model, while others looked much more appropriate.