At the beginning of my course to media I had very low knowledge of the skills and conventions of music magazines. As the course of the year developed I began to experiment with different technologies, my skills and understanding of magazines grew.
My preliminary task was to create a college magazine with a rough contents page. As my image shows you, I h ad began to develop brief ideas and understanding when it came to creating a magazine cover. I missed out important conventions however, an issue number, competitions and much more. My use of colour was quite vague, I didn't vary the fonts so it looks rather dull and wouldn't be appealing to a potential buyer. Plus I hadn't cropped out the background, this wasn't because I decided not to, but because my understanding of photoshop wasn't high enough to do so. This caused another problem as it made text on the front cover rather hard to read as the background is quite dark itself. Furthermore my image isn't placed in the centre of the cover which doesn't make it any the more eye catching. My contents page lacks significant features. These include a title, page number, eye catching stories and a use of appealing images.
After completing my preliminary task, my knowledge developed and by the time I began designing my music magazine I had a better understanding of the technology, skills and conventional features I needed to include in them. As my images of my music magazine below show, there is a large transition from my preliminary task to my music magazine task. On my front cover I used a range of different fonts to keep it from being vague. I did use minimal colours of black and white which I discuss on my combined question 4 and 5. On my music magazine cover I placed my image central rather than on the right like I did my preliminary task. Plus I included typical conventions on my magazine front cover including a plug, masthead, menu, strapline, caption and splash. In comparison I also used photoshop to remove background on my images across my music magazine, I did this as it allowed me to be left with a white background which was an overall plan of mine. Also on my original task for the college magazine, I had used a low quality camera which then effected the quality of the picture itself. Whereas on my music magazine I used my iPhone 4 which contains a high quality camera which made the quality of my image that much better. On my contents page of my music magazine I included the title and page number. A feature I hadn't used on my college magazine. I also used a range of images, the model on my magazine was in different poses across the three products. An important note is that for our product we had to include a minimum of 4 images, I had originally only used 3, so on my contents page, as you can see, there is a small picture of another person (who in fact is myself) above a quote to reach the target of 4 images. I also used selected quotes across my music magazine products, this was another improvement as it's a typical feature used to attract your audience. My music magazine shows this great improvement from my preliminary task.When comparing both products together there is a clear improvement from my college magazine to my music magazine. I had researched different punk rock magazines before designing my music magazine so I began to have a grasp of the type of layout and features I would include on it. Using other information helped me to think of how I want to design my magazine and looking back at my college magazine showed me features of what I did not want to include. The improvements from then to now are high in my opinion as I felt I've learnt how to grasp technologies such as InDesign and Photoshop and ways in which to create a magazine front cover, contents page and double page spread.
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