1. My planning skills have improved a lot when producing my three
products. I thought about audience (age, gender, social class,
etc…), design (colour schemes, images, positioning), content
(what works and what doesn’t when included in the magazine). I
planned by questioning people that would fit the profile of my
target audience in order to see what they would like in a
magazine, and I then sketched out a rough design, planned what
would go into each page and then when creating it, I changed
things as I went along if I felt they didn’t look right, they didn’t
work or something else would simply be a better fit.

2. When taking photographs for my magazine, I found that taking
just one picture wouldn’t be enough even if it’s just one that you
need. This is because if you take just one image of someone, the
positioning of them, or the pose or background might not be right
for what you want the image for, so by taking several images, you
have a larger range of photos to choose from to make your
product look as good as you want it to look.

3. Before designing and creating my products, I had never used
Photoshop or Quark before so it was very much a learn as I went
along situation. At first I found it very difficult to understand the
tools and what you could achieve on these programmes, but
when I got the hang of it, I found that it’s not as complicated as I
first thought and I was able to create all parts of the three of my
products exactly as I wanted them. Photoshop I found was
particularly good as I could manipulate images to fit to what I
wanted them to be. Whether this is was the colour, the contrast
or the background. I was also able to move and replace things as
and when I wanted to in order to match or improve on my design.

4. When I first designed my products I did it on paper. I started out
with a rough copy of what I wanted it to look like and then took
this onto the two programmes Photoshop and Quark. Photoshop
was really good for design as it is simple to adjust and move
things around to arrange them how you want. Quark was a great
programme to use when designing my double page spread as it
gave you the two pages together so that you didn’t have to do it
in two halves, but could design it as it would be printed and sold.