The student has improved their skills in Photoshop by practicing tools like the polygonal lasso, crop tool, and blending options to make their music magazine more professional. This allowed them to produce a more realistic magazine that would appeal to their target audience. Their preliminary magazine did not follow conventions like proper page layout, relevant images, and consistent fonts and colors. In contrast, their final magazine used higher quality images representing the genre, spread out page numbers to look like more content, and kept consistent fonts and colors fitting for a hip hop magazine. Through this project, the student learned new software skills and the importance of planning and research to produce a high quality magazine aligned with its target genre.

2.  Taking a look back at my preliminary task, I can say my skills with Photoshop have
greatly improved whilst continuously experimenting with a range of different tools such
as the polygonal lasso tool, crop tool and a range of different blending options to truly
make my music magazine look more professional. Gradually practicing to use these
tools to a great standard allowed me to produce a more realistic music magazine, and
one that my target audience may believe is more legit, leading them to buy the product.
It is clear that my knowledge of conventions which depends on the genre, means it
must be designed in a certain way. With my latest music magazine I feel that it does
follow the conventions of a typical Hip Hop magazine, whereas with my preliminary task
all the subheadings are mixed up all over the place, and my main image hardly covers
most of the front page, but not only that the mast head is too small, and the page
overall is filled with different fonts and colours, which is not expected of a Hip Hop
music magazine.
BEFORE AFTER

3. Before After
Clearly you can see a tremendous difference between my preliminary task and my final
product in terms of quality and professionalism, and appealing to my target market. A major
difference is the images used, from my preliminary task I didn’t even use images that I had to
take myself, but instead I took from Google images which is disallowed. Whereas with my
final product the images used are all of a high quality, and are representing the genre
effectively with each photo showing what the life of a typical young rapper is. Another huge
mistake I made in my preliminary task was not, at least spreading out the page numbers to
make it look like the magazine has a lot to offer, but instead I listed from number 1,2,3... Etc.
Whereas when I done my research I found out that each subheading has to be unique and
different from the others so it looks like the magazine offers a diverse range of information.
Not to mention there are many different colours used in my preliminary task, and I did not
stick with the same font from the front page and took on a completely different font which
shares no relevance.

4.  Ultimately, from this coursework I have learnt a variety of skills with a range of different
software to a reasonably high level and I am able to present these ideas in many ways,
whereas before I had started the coursework I did not even know that these software's
even existed. I now know how key planning is, and is essential to producing the best
music magazine as it will give you a base from what design to follow similarly, instead of
just being thrown out there with no knowledge, and make the music magazine to a poor
standard, because there will be questions you will not be able to answer. Overall creating
a music magazine with no planning and research is very difficult, and when made will not
be to a good standard. Something else that is crucial in a music magazine is maintaining
consistency of font, colour and the genre of the magazine, because you cannot switch
from one target audience to another with one music magazine and is vital you appeal to
the ones you have chosen, by the type of magazine you decide to make