The document summarizes what the author learned from their preliminary school magazine task and how they improved for their main music magazine task. Some key things the author learned were to do more detailed research, use professional magazines as inspiration for layouts, vary fonts for visual interest, and better manage their time between research and production. For the music magazine, the author applied their Photoshop and InDesign skills, researched appropriate models, costumes, and photography styles to match the R&B genre. Overall, the author felt their final product more closely resembled a professional magazine compared to their initial school magazine.

1. Evaluation Question Seven
Looking back at the preliminary task
(the school magazine task) what do you
feel you have learnt in progression from
it to the main task?

2. Research and Planning
I have improved a lot since I did the preliminary task. I feel my music magazine resembles
professional production more than my school magazine. This is because when I was doing my
music magazine research I went into more detail since I knew more about what to look for and
what I was doing. For example, I researched things like fonts, make-up and costume for my
models, all these things I did not research in my preliminary task. For both of my music magazine
and for my preliminary task I had to produce a flat plan of what I wanted my finishing product to
look like.

3. Research and Planning
When planning my flat plan drawing I did not think to use a magazine as inspiration, I just used
my general knowledge on what I knew magazines looked like. I also did not realize at that time
that the sell lines had to be very interesting and that they needed to get the readers attention to
want to read on. Also I did not do any research into things like the font so I just used the same
font throughout which could be argued by saying it is consistent however variation makes it more
interesting. These are just a few things that I did not know or did not do effectively when doing
my preliminary task. I improved a lot on these however when doing my final product.

4. Research and Planning
Probably the only difference between the flat plans used is that for my final product, I changed
the idea from what was originally drawn to something that would look more professional. This
decision was made after getting feedback off my peers and after more research into what
professional music magazines look like. I feel like my time was better managed when doing the
final task of the music magazine than when doing the preliminary task because for that I spent
too much time on the research and planning than on the actual production.

5. Production
The software used for the front cover on both my prelim and music magazine was Photoshop. When doing my
preliminary task, I had never used Photoshop before but after that I knew the basics and it was easier to learn
the rest. Also because I did quite a lot of research on what professional magazines do to produce great covers,
it was easy for me to almost replicate similar ideas and use in my magazine. I had to think about how the font
to image ratio had to go on the front cover and how different sell lines would need to be different sizes e.g. the
mast head would have to be bigger than the sell lines and the main sell line would have to be bigger than the
rest of the sell lines. However for my prelim, you cannot really tell which sell line is the main sell line because
all the sell lines are different sizes but you can tell which one the mast head is because it is the biggest.

6. Production
For the contents page and double page spread, I had to use InDesign because this allowed me to
put columns and helped me with aligning my texts. For my prelim, I also used InDesign but I did
not know that it helped with alignments and columns at the time so I did not use to guidelines to
their full extent. For the music magazine, I had to use models that suited the genre of the
magazine. I also had to do test shots in the studio to see what background I would need and also
to test out the models poses as well as costume and make-up. These are all things I neglected to
research when doing my preliminary task.

7. Production
I think that if the prelim had a guideline like the music magazine which was everything had to
suite the genre, it would have been better. The only guideline we had for that was that it had to
represent the target audience that were 16 – 18 year olds that were attending QE. The mise-en-
scene for the music magazine also had to suit the genre of the magazine. However since my
magazine genre was R&B I felt that I would take all my pictures in the studio instead of outside
because that suited my genre quite well.