Evaluation Question 7 - Draft

7) Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

After revisiting my preliminary tasks, I have realised that the quality of work has improved drastically over the period of time we had to complete our project and I believe that I have made great progress. My preliminary task didn’t have much effort put in to it as the layout isn’t at a professional standard and also isn’t at the standard of my final version. At the start, my research and planning wasn’t in much depth as I didn’t look at key things such as the size of the barcode or the spacing around the edge of the page. However, my preliminary task allowed to be learn from my mistakes and helped me to achieve what I managed to make as the end product. For the final version, I did a much more in depth research as I was able to find out information about which colours work best with what in order to make the magazine stand out to all the rest. For my final version, I used the colour scheme red, white and black mainly and my magazine stood out greatly compared to other magazines. It also helped as my band members wore colours which worked well with the colour scheme. Looking back at my preliminary music magazine, it was very basic with very minimal detail on the front cover and on the contents page. All fonts were too big and some of the writing on the front cover was squished to make sure that it all fit on which looks less appealing as the fonts look different. The barcode on the front cover hasn’t got the same spacing as the other writing on the page which doesn’t give it a big enough border around the edge to make it look neater. In addition, on the contents page, the spacing between each line where the information is isn’t equal which doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing. Moreover, the size of the fonts is different on each title and the page numbers are different sizes as well. The issue number is too big making it unprofessional as well and is normally located on the front cover. If I was to redo my preliminary task, I would definitely put more effort in to making it look more professional as it isn’t very good but the lesson I have learnt is to put effort in to the research and planning which would help me to complete a better magazine as I can look at other magazines for inspiration and ideas on where to locate certain information.

I progressed after completing my preliminary because I was also learning about new technologies such as the software we were using in order to make our magazines. Photoshop was new to me and I had never used it before until we had started working on it for media. As time passed, I began to feel more comfortable using this software as can be seen in the difference between my preliminary task and my final version. A tool which I struggled t use but managed to work it in the end was the magnetic lasso. I used this for my final version when I layered the title so that it looked as if the band members on the front were the main focus as they were above my title but it could still be easily read by the audience. I could’ve used the magnetic lasso tool over my front cover and contents page adding a coloured background to make it look more professional rather than the background colour where you can see that artists shadow in the different shades of colour behind the artist.