Skills development

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

I feel as though I have come quite a way since the preliminary task of the college magazine. In doing the preliminary task it allowed me to try and arrange things how I wanted and I was able to experiment with a few basic elements like imagery, layout and fonts. I feel this was a useful task to do to get into producing the music magazine as it was sort of an experiment and experience in what to include on the front cover and how to use the images to the greatest effect etc.

My main image for the preliminary task could have been better, I should have had my model looking directly at the camera as to grab the attention of potential readers. The images below (left) is the image from my college magazine and has an objective gaze and I think is therefore less striking as the image (right) from my music magazine which has a wide eyed subjective gaze which stands out quite instantly to a reader to draw them in.



There is no obvious main headline for my college magazine, all the articles are in the same style, size and font so there is no way to tell what the main story for the magazine is, which is needed to attract readers, all the articles are quite plain and boring, there is no 'breaking news!' or some sort of controversy to make readers want to pick up the magazine and look at it. However I feel that I have learnt from this with my college magazine and was able to make the changes needed and used different fonts and colours for


The image (left) of the post-it-note and the text is what I used for all the cover lines on my college magazine, and is quite dull and boring. The images (right) are some of the fonts used on my front cover for my music magazine and are slightly more interesting to look at and add to the rest of the composition of the cover.

I feel that I was ok with the software as I've been using it for over a year now so I didn't really learn much from doing these and didn't have any problems that I can recall, however I think the music magazine looks better because I was able to use the software to a higher standard with better imagery and having looked at quite a few front covers of magazines to get ideas on how to fade images out and make them stand out, which I hadn't thought about when doing the preliminary.