1) The document discusses the production process of a magazine over October and November. It details the initial planning and scaffolding work done in October to prepare for production. 2) Most of November was spent working on the "scaffolding" for the magazine layout in InDesign, which took half the month to complete along with adjustments. Time was also spent researching magazine styles and settling on a color scheme. 3) Setting the contents page to align with guidelines was very challenging due to the author's perfectionist tendencies, though it was important to adhere to requirements to earn good marks. Additional work remained including taking photographs and designing logos.

1. Production Diary: October – November. Starting
the magazine.
Firstly, I would like to apologise for the lack of posting over the course of the past 3
months. Heavy work and progress on my magazine and evaluations has taken up a lot
of time which could have been spent writing diaries, meaning that posts have become
less frequent.
In this post, I shall be discussing the main steps in the progress of my magazine and
giving a detailed insight as to what happened and how I achieved it.
The end of October was when the serious work really began. Final drafts had been
completed, model release forms for Daniel, Zak, Hugo and Aaron had been
completed, surveys had been filled in and confidence was high going into the
production.
November was to be the month of hard work. In this course, work comes thick and
fast. As soon as one thing ends, another begins, meaning that time was of the essence.
The month started with the “Scaffolding” for my magazine. It was vitally important
that this was error free, even at an early stage. The scaffolding involved a certain
amount of dedicated time on InDesign. This was not only tedious, but frustrating.
Being uneducated in certain shortcuts or particular tools did stall my progress a little,
as it meant that I had to spend more time doing things what could take a lot less time
if I had known the shortcuts. Luckily for me, I had people around me other than my
teacher who could teach me how to use them, meaning that I didn’t feel as if it was all
spoon fed to me.
The whole scaffolding process took up at least half of the month to finish without
adjustments. Further adjustments were made and are still being made.
A lot of my time in November was spent looking through different magazines to get
inspiration. It would be a lie to say that I was happy with how the layout of my
magazine looked after the first, second and third attempt. I felt that it needed to have a
more realistic feel to it, which is why for an entire week, at home and school; I stuck
my head into every kind of magazine in order to get inspiration from them. One thing
that is important to any magazine is the style. It gives the magazine a sense of identity
and meaning. I knew that I needed a specific theme or style for my magazine, with
colours being the most important part of it. I decided to create a colour sketch board
on PowerPoint. The presentation was short and very basic, but included all of the
possible colours that I could use for my magazine. It was a long time before I finally
decided to stick to the colour scheme of black, red and white – which were the colours
I had used for my film magazine back in year 10 and 11. Once I was happy with the
colours and brief style of the magazine, I started to feel a lot more confident about
how my magazine would look. Things started to feel as if they looked right and my
magazine felt very professional.

2. However, despite this slight increase in confidence, there was a challenge which did
take a few attempts to overcome.
My main problem was being able to set out all of my texts and pictures on my
contents page so that they were in line with the guidelines which we had to use when
setting out our magazine. This was an extremely difficult activity because I am a
particularly fussy person. Furthermore, I had basically settled with the decision to
base my contents page on NME. However, the fact that everything needed to be in
line altered how my final product would look. In all honesty, I was fairly unhappy
about this, but I knew that in order to get the best marks possible, I needed to stick to
the guidelines and advice given to me by my teacher.
Once the layout for the magazine was sorted, there were things that still needed to be
done. I am yet to take and add pictures for my magazine and create logos for my band
and other featured bands.
Read my next blog entry to find out more on the progression.