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1. Reflective Diary

2. Week 1
For the first week of production I focused mainly on writing the articles for my fanzine. I needed
enough information and text to fill three double page spreads for each artist that I was looking into. I
already had a few ideas of what I wanted to create from my pre-proposal as well as my planning,
where I had already created mock-up layouts that I could use as inspiration. I didn’t necessarily need to
do an extra research but I wanted to make sure that all of the information I had found was correct so I
ended up having to fact check everything. It didn’t take me long to write columns for each of my
artists. I wanted to focus on writing the introductions for each of my artists before going and writing
the rest of columns. The first I had created was for Studio Ghibli where I spoke about Hayao Miyazaki
and talked a bit about his previous works as well as a bit about Studio Ghibli in general. I’d say that one
of the strongest parts of my product for this project (as well as the previous print project) was the
writing I did for my articles. This is because I used a variety of different sources including some of my
own knowledge in order to make my articles seem as informative as possible.
I think that my first week of production was the most successful. This is because I was able to
accomplish everything I wanted just within the first few days. This meant that later on in the same
week I was able to start experimenting with page layouts. However I went back and decided to write a
bit more for specific parts of my articles e.g. I thought that Studio Ghibli’s second page (the double
page spread dedicated to the artists history) lacked more information than the other pages I had
already wrote. I’m glad that I ended up going back because it allowed me to add more information
which I thought later on helped my product look much better. I wasn’t behind much on any of the
other previous work so I didn’t have to waste any time doing work I hadn’t finished.

4. Week 2
The second week was to focus on starting to create my page layouts. Using the mock-up ideas I had
created during the planning phase as well as the feedback I had received from my interviews I was able
to create the first three pages for my fanzine during Tuesday and Thursday. I then went on to start
creating the fourth page on the Friday. On the Tuesday I focused on making sure that I had all of my
articles ready and also made sure that I wasn’t missing anything. During that same day I create two
pages for two of my artists, which were Studio Ghibli and Hiro Mashima. These particular pages were
fairly simple to make since I already knew what size I wanted the pages and how I wanted to create the
layouts. Since I had already created the first two pages by the end of the first lesson of Tuesday I then
added the main title and some parts of my articles to see if it would all work well together. I thought
that the page seemed too crowded with text so I took some time on Google Images to see if I could
find any images that would not only match with the artist but also not take too much away from the
text. (i.e. the image would have to be related to the artist that I was talking about such as; if I were
talking about Studio Ghibli I would want to include an image to one of their movies). I did the same
with both of my pages that I had made that day.
On the Friday I began to create the next page for my third artist. I found myself in a similar situation as
last time where I had already create the page with a majority of time to spare. I decided that I would
do the same as I did the day before and find imagery as well as the title and articles. I went through the
same process as last time.

5. (do not have a screenshot of the page before text and
imagery was added)

6. Week 3
For the next week of production I continued to create the pages for my fanzine. This week I focused on
the final three of my artists these were Shigenori Soejima, Hirohiko Araki and Junji Ito. There weren’t
many problems that I faced during the production phase so far but I didn’t want to have anything mess
up so I took my time to make sure that everything was up to the standard that I want it to be. I realized
during this week that there was work that I had not finished (i.e. in terms of finishing the feedback I
received from my tutor or work that I may not have finished in general). I thought that since I had
already accomplished what I wanted to do this week I could go back and finish this work off with the
last lessons I had left, this being on Friday. I went through the same process as I did with my previous
pages and made all three of them on between Tuesday and Thursday. For the work that I went back to
finish this was my research and my contextual research. I had received feedback from my tutor about
what I could do to improve these PowerPoint's and did my best to get as much done with the three
time I had from the few lessons. I wasn’t able to finish but I did end up getting a lot done. A got a lot
more done than I ever had at home.
Since we only had two lessons on Tuesday I had to do as much as I possibly could since our days off
from college, Monday and Wednesday, were dedicated to finishing off any previous work that I hadn’t
finished or have yet do the feedback for. I continued doing this through the weekend as well as trying
to balance doing work for my Maths.
(I don’t have any screenshots from the work for these artists I had done before I
decided to create entirely new layouts. However they were very similar to the
previous ones shown.)

7. Week 4
Toward the end of this week is where I began to have second thoughts about all of the pages I had
made so far. However during the first two days of college that week I continued to make pages for my
fanzine. I focused on making the second double page spreads and ended up making four and only
needed to make two more before I needed to move onto the final double page spreads. However
during my day off on Wednesday I was going some extra research for that same piece of work and
found a website called issuu (which had been mentioned to me before during tutorial). I ended up
coming across a magazine called ‘Brightness Magazine’ which included some minimalistic yet appealing
layouts that I thought could work with my own fanzine. I thought that this would be simple to achieve
since I had already written all of the articles for the first two double page spreads. I would then be able
to just add those articles to those pages, add a title and then add any extra details and/or imagery that
I thought would look good. However I struggled with making the layouts look good, at least in my
opinion, and often found myself restarting. All of this being on the Thursday and Friday during the
same week.
I wanted to focus on making sure that these layouts would be the final result for my fanzine so I
experimented with a variety of different styles to see what would work and what wouldn’t. At the time
I didn’t think that I was going to finish and thought that I should’ve just kept what I had made
previously and just continued however I think that my end product is much better than what I would
have made instead so I’m glad that I decided to stick with this new idea.

9. Week 5
I continued to redevelop my fanzine during this week as well. I kept coming up with layouts that I
thought would look good and work well with my product but would later decide that I didn’t like them
anymore. I kept going with this process through Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I decided to
continue doing this work during my day off instead of doing other work since I thought that this held a
higher priority and I also had thought that I wasn’t going to finish on time. However during Thursday I
remembered an idea I had come up during my planning phase which was to overlap the images I had
chosen for my fanzine alongside a shape with the same colour scheme (a more detailed version is
shown in my planning PowerPoint).
I ended up liking the idea and tried to come up with layouts that were similar in a way. The first layout I
made was for Studio Ghibli and using the overlapping idea from before I made the images I used stand
out more. I ended up really liking how these page turned out so I decided to try it again with my other
pages. By the end of the day on Thursday I had already pretty much caught back up to where I was
before. I had already made the two double page spreads for four of my artists. Since I still had another
week or so (either two weeks or one week. I’m unsure of how many weeks we ended up having but I
still did the same thing so it doesn’t make much of a difference).

14. Week 6 (and 7?)
I continued with what I was doing the previous week making sure that I took my time to avoid any
mistakes so that I didn’t have to start over again since it was something that I couldn’t afford to do with
hardly any time left. By the end of Thursday, the last week of production, I had finished making all of
my double page spreads and was ready to put it all together when I remembered that I still hadn’t
made my front cover, a contents page or even my back cover. This was something that I had to rush
since I only had three lessons and still needed to get other work done. This being the main reason why
those three pages look a lot different to my other pages. Although it wasn’t how I imagined my product
to look like in the end I’m still happy that I was able to get it done. I did the majority of the work on the
laptop I had borrowed from college as well as Photoshop. It was difficult to use at first since it would
crash instantly and stop working but overtime I managed to create all of my pages well.
There was an issue with fonts using that software however. The problem was that the fonts wouldn’t
show up on the page no matter what font or size I tried. I wasn’t sure how to fix the problem so I
decided to save the pages into jpegs and then import my articles using PowerPoint. I was originally
going to use InDesign however I faced the same issue as with Photoshop. I think the problem with the
majority of software on this laptop is that it’s severely outdated to the Macs we use at college.
However since this allowed me to work at home I didn’t really feel like this was an issue that I couldn’t
handle. In the end I was able to get my product finished on time despite the problems I faced during
the production process.