A detailed power point presentation focusing on the hardwareand software used in AS media in the creation and development of the students music magazine.

1. Amie Page

2. Hardware
The physical products I used to help me build my
magazine for example keyboards, computers and
cameras.

3. Apple Mac
The main piece of hardware I have used during the process of building my
magazine has been an Apple Mac. The Apple Mac I have been using has
been the Mac OS X with a 2 GHz Intel core processor and an 8GB memory.
The Apple Mac is an essential piece of equipment to getting a professional
finish as it contains much of the software that wouldn't’t be accessible on a
windows computer, such as Photoshop.

4. Key Board and Mouse
The Keyboard and mouse have been staple products to help me control the
Apple Mac computers, as they have been my tools to help me select the various
different programmes and tools I have wanted to use on software such as
Microsoft word, power-point and photo-shop.The mouse is the model A1152
and the keyboard model number was the A1242, this are quite advanced models
and allow me to easily use and quickly make amendments to my magazine
cover, contents and article.

5. Camera- Nikon Coolpix (L310)
Nikon Coolpix L310 is a bridge camera
some of the key features are:
-14 megapixel CCD sensor
-Sensor shift vibration reduction (VR)
-3 inch LCD screen
-Sports continuous mode
-720p HD video recording
-ISO 80 - 6400
-1cm minimum focusing distance
- 21 x optical zoom
-Smart Portrait System
This camera and these key feature really
helped me to get a really good quality
photograph for my cover, contents and
article. Most of the photos were extremely
well focused and good quality, especially if I
needed to use the zoom feature. Also on the
head shots of Erin the facial recognition
feature would pick out the face and focus on
this, ensuring I got a very good image most
times.

6. Phone (Photographs)
This is an Apple IPhone 4s and the phone that helped me to take a live photo of
Luke Friend to put in my contents page, the camera has quite good quality in good
lighting and when not zoomed in too much, so overall for a camera I wouldn’t
expect to capture a great photo I was quite pleased as this live shot really helped
me to capture the more professional look of other magazines, whose contents
pages are full of live images from concerts, festivals and gigs.

7. SD Memory Card Stick
This is a SD Card memory stick or adapter
and can transfer images from cameras
and onto computers. I didn’t use this
during the actual creation of my
magazine, I used it during the creation of
my school magazine which really helped
me discover the different ways of
transporting photographs to my
computer, so it did help me learn about
various different technologies.

8. Software
All the programmes used to help create my music
magazine and what I have learnt from them.

9. Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a software programme that helps
to create ‘creative workflows of all types’, so that
anyone can easily make more creative documents that
can’t be done on a word or power-point document.
Photoshop has helped me develop all three sections of
my magazine making them look more professional with
their extensive range of tools. I have learnt many things
about this software such as how to edit images in a
natural way to slightly change the lighting, touch up the
appearance of a person, how to edit text adding
different effects and how to arrange a document in an
ordered way using rulers.

10. First in photoshop I learnt how to create a new
document, in different sizes and layouts (this was
particularly important for the layout of the
article).Then using the text tool, I learnt how put
a text onto this new document.

11. This text could have
various different font
types and we
downloaded some
ourselves, which were
added to our text
library. This text
could also be edited
more as we added
drop shadows, stroke,
inner shadow, outer/
inner glow, colour
overlay etc.

12. Another feature I
learnt to do from
photoshop was to edit
images and increase
their brightness and
contrast, intensifying
the features on my
artists face. I also
learnt to take aspects
of an image and place
them on another, so
my image wasn’t fully
big enough to fit A4.
So I cut out parts of
the background and
placed them above
Erin creating room for
my masthead, so that
it would cover her
face.

13. Another feature of Photoshop that
really helped me create a
professional look to my magazine
was creating a blur on the
background and lesser features of the
images in my cover, contents and
article.This image to the right shows
the different when using the blur
compared to not using it. It shows
how I can smooth out and enhance
the photograph without making it
look really edited.
No Blur Blur

14. WordPress
WordPress is the company we
used to set up our blogs to
enable us to document all of our
work, keeping an online diary. It
has helped me to keep my work
organised and explore various
different creative methods of
displaying my work.

15. The first view of my blog
MyVarious pages
My Music Magazine Page
My blog has various different
features that help me and
others to find all my work
quickly and easily. Such
features are pages which have a
link strait to my work so for
example I have shown here that
there is a link strait to my
finished music magazine,
showing the final versions of
my contents, cover and article
pages.

16. WordPress also allows me to keep up to date and reorder (if
needed) my blog posts. It keeps an online record of every blog
post and draft I have created enabling me to edit and improve
anything I need to extremely quickly. I also can add a new post
by clicking on just one button which helped me to document all
the various ideas and final product of my magazine quickly and
efficiently.

17. WordPress also have vast amounts of different themes for me to choose from in
order to personalise my blog. However these are also important as they help me to
display my blog in a structure that I want, so if I wanted my blog to mainly focus on
photographs they have themes to suit this. However I wanted my blog to be easily
readable with a focus more on a scroll down structure, to help it flow.

18. PowerPoint
Power point has helped me to display and set out
my various evaluation questions in more
interesting way, so instead of having a blog post I
can organise my ideas into different sections,
with various amount of pictures and screen shots.
I also think that power-point helped me to display
my work with more flow and design as there are
many different styles to choose from.
Power-point also allows me to edit images and add text boxes and shapes
helping me to get my point across when explaining about my magazine.

19. SlideShare
Slide share is a virtual storage unit of many different
power-points and documents that can either be
viewed by the public or set to private. However I
used slide share to upload my power points to my
blog using the embedded code provided. Slide share
not only helps other people with questions they
might have but allows them to see it in a visual way.

20. MicrosoftWord
Microsoft is a piece of software that help
enables people to create ‘beautiful and
engaging documents’. I used this programme
not to make a document seen by others but to
plan the writing of my article before I put it into
InDesign. I was able to plan my article
sufficiently, ensuring all spelling and grammar
was correct, this gave me a much more
professional sounding article.

21. PlannedWord Document Article
Word also enabled me to
organise my article into
columns so I could get a
sense of what my article
would look and feel like.

22. InDesign
Was a programme I used to arrange the text on
my article, it had a lot more options text wise
than Photoshop and really let me ensure my
article looked neat and professional.
My article in
InDesign.

23. These two tools were probably the most used tools in
InDesign.They are the mouse tool (to move around my
text boxes) and the text tool (to add or edit text to fit the
theme of the article.These helped me to have the text
placed in the various columns, also another feature that I
found really useful was the over flow, so if there was too
much text in one column it would naturally start typing
into the next column.This let me concentrate on the
presentation of the article.

24. This stroke tool was a really useful tool and
again a tool I used a lot to make the text stand
out compared to the page, giving the article a
much more professional look.
I also learnt how to use the colour and
effects which played a big part to my
article text and graphics as for example I
put a very faint glow around the
headline ‘Erin Laidlaw’ to just make it
stand out rom the page slightly.
Another aspect that really helped me advance
my magazine was the character styles, there
are many different character styles and more
than photo-shop so you can get a better
range and therefore more tailored to your
genre of magazine.

25. YouTube
YouTube was a piece of
software I used to add
videos linking to my
indie-folk theme, it
helped me get a sense of
style, music type,
attitudes of artists and
settings they could
normally play in. It also
enabled me to take
inspiration from videos
such as mentioned in my
previous evaluation and
planning questions.