Reflection of my print project

1. Production Reflection
William Anderson

2. Process
I started off my production by creating a draft for my
magazine cover. This cover was heavily inspired by
other magazines I had seen of the same genre. The
images I used were obtained online, with one image
being used as the main motif of the page. The cover is
split in two by the title of the magazine: Classics
Collectors, a name I chose due to its alliteration –
something which is widely used in car magazines (e.g.
Classic Cars). The title is supported by a white
background, which helps to emphasize the title as well
as fill unused space. However, due to the imbalance in
the quantity of information provided between the top
and bottom of the page, this white box also
emphasises the fact that most of the information is
compacted into the bottom half of the page.
Overall I am happy with this draft, as it fits the theme
of the magazine and utilises the techniques used in
professional magazines.

3. Process
When creating my final magazine cover, I made sure to
take into consideration what pros and cons my draft idea
had. For example, I made sure to include more
information at the top of the page in order to even out
the spacing of the text and images. Furthermore, I
decided to remove the white backdrop of the title as I
felt it disrupted the background image too much.
Furthermore, the darker colour of the background
allowed the brighter text to contrast more and therefore
be easy to read without any sort of aid. In order to create
said background image, I used an image of a country
road in the evening and edited a Jaguar Mark.2 3.4 Litre
onto it. To make the vehicle feel like it really belonged
with the backdrop, I made a shadow for it which was
positioned according to the sunlight.
The cover contains many short and snappy phrases
advertising what to expect in the magazine – something I
brought over from my draft. This information, whilst
mostly white text, utilises yellow and red text which help
to emphasize certain words e.g. people’s names.

4. Process
I planned out my double-page spread by creating a
simple draft outlining the structure of the pages. The
title ’Old vs New’ was used as it is short and snappy –
immediately telling the reader what to expect from the
pages. Furthermore, this title creates a sense of
excitement as it suggests some form of battle is
undergoing.
The pages focus on celebrities, who are used to entice
the reader to look at the pages whilst giving what is
being said a sense of authenticity. Whilst I believe that
utilising celebrities does help the pages, I also found
that the images used took up too much of the page.
Furthermore, due to needing to not cover up the
celebrities, the text on the page is very scattered and
disorganised. To improve on this, I would use smaller
images of the celebrities or just use a smaller
proportion of their body e.g. their head.
Yellow text is used to help any quotations stand out
amongst the text. This will help the reader to locate
important quotes quickly. I specifically used yellow as it
not only stands out amongst the white text, but also
stands out against the grey background.

5. ProcessThis final piece is vastly different from the draft I
made. The entire layout has been changed in order
to organise the text better. I did this by Putting
placeholder text in before I added anything else so
that any images or extra text could be placed
around it, therefore not disrupting it. The ratio of
text to image is balanced, with the images taking
up the upper half of the page. A white background
helps to make these images more eye-catching.
The smaller images initially had a different
saturation to the bigger image. To fix this, I added
an adjustment layer in Photoshop and increases
the saturation of the smaller images. To create the
article, I researched the featured car both online
and by interviewing people in person. This allowed
me to create a more authentic and detailed article.
Overall I am happy with how this piece turned out.
The colour scheme is consistent, with the yellow
highlights sharing the same hue as the yellow in
the images. Furthermore, there aren’t any place
son the page that feel vacant. However, the smaller
image in the top right corner of the page appears
to be slightly brighter than the other two. Although
I don’t believe this to have a big impact on the
aesthetic of the page, if I were to do this again I
would fix this by adding another adjustment layer
that was only above this image in order to make it
slightly darker.