Evaluation - Q6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Photographs:

Over the project I learnt about the different types of shots that are used in magazines and where they are used. E.g. the main image on the front cover of a magazine is normally a mid shot, and there is normally only one person in it.

I know that if you focus the camera right you can get a crisp image, this is important on magazines to make them look professional and it also makes it more aesthetically pleasing.

I found out that out that by matching some of the colours that the model wears, it makes the end result more aesthetically pleasing as well, and give the final magazine a professional look.

Photoshop:

I learnt how to stretch images and how to use the wand to select similar colours of an image to cut it from its background, like what I did for the pins on the contents page.

I now know how to pull the corners of images around which made the blue tack on the contents page look like it had been squashed onto the page, making it look more realistic.

I messed with the effects that are available on Photoshop and I managed to make the pins, blue tack, tap, and the images where stuck onto the contents page, and this gave the page a 3D look that worked well with the cover and double page spread as they to have this 3D look. The blood splatter that is on the cover worked a lot better than I thought that it would because the effects that I added didn’t just pot and show the shadow of it, but they also picked up what would be the light and made it look like it was wet and domed. Making it looks like I had thrown some blood on a piece of paper and taken a photograph.

I can download fonts that I can use in Photoshop and that can be used in InDesign, like the one that I used for the title of the double page spread.

I can now add colours to images so that can have the photo that I want but still change it to fit the genre if needed like what I did to the backgrounds of the cover, contents page, and the double page spread.

InDesign:

I know how to use the layers and how to set up the two centimetre overlay of the page (so that it didn’t matter if the machine that cuts the pages is accurate, meaning the colour goes right to the finished edge). And I also worked out how to have the column guide lines, but I kept getting rid of them so I could see what it would look like if it was a finished page.

I can use the effects on InDesign to make the image look like they a proper old fashioned photos (the photos on the right hand page) and I gave them a drop shadow so that it looks as if someone has just dropped them onto the page. I used the loop tool to ruffle cut out the so that it looked as if someone had ripped the images (the black paper at the top of the pages and the photo on the left hand side).

Challenges:

One of the challenges that I came up against was when I first started to work on the preliminary task I had never used Photoshop or InDesign before, and this was reflected in my work because it wasn’t that good. So to work round this I just tried different effects, and worked out what does what by pushing buttons and seeing what they did. With the time I had between the two projects and the time I had to complete the music magazine, I had a much greater ability to use both of the programmes effectively. This was reflected in ‘Dark Tech’ as it looks more professional, and it shows some of the different effects that you can get when using both programmes.

Another challenge that I faced was the double page spread article. I made the page look professional and it fitted with my genre well, but when I wrote the first article it sounded like it should have been in a Pop magazine and not the Techno Goth on that it was in. So to sort this out I scrapped the article and started again, only this time I used based my article on a real one that was written on Amy Lee (she is the lead singer of evanescence). But by doing this the article is of the Goth genre and it don’t have that much of the Techno genre in it, but there is a little.

Other:

I learnt to schedule the blogs on blogger so that important blogs were grouped together. And I also worked out how to change the colour of the text so that I could highlight when someone else was giving the information, or for other important information was being used like the questions of the evaluation, etc.