1. Looking Back At Your Preliminary Task (The College Magazine Task), What Do You Feel You Have
Learnt In The Progression From It To Full Product?
Overall my progression has developed hugely since I first created my preliminary task, I had no basic
knowledge on the forms and conventions of a magazine and what I needed to include to make it
relevant to my target audience. In my preliminary task I was simply basing my forms and
conventions based on the results shown in my student questionnaire, this was at great help to me
but was not effective as my own research on the magazine industry. When learning how to use
Photoshop for my main magazine I was able to understand the layers more and think of use of fonts,
positioning of fonts, colour schemes and camera angles which I did not take into consideration on
my preliminary task. Looking at the difference in my preliminary task and full product you are able to
recognise that I have gained more knowledge on the forms and conventions needed to create an
appealing music magazine, in which I did not know before. I did not realise that using too many
different fonts would make my magazine seem less appealing and too busy in comparison to my full
product. I had to think about how I would take my photographs so they would enable me enough
room to place wording around my model in my images.
Gaining a better insight of Photoshop really helped to get my magazine looking professional and
realistic. It’s clear to see that in my preliminary task I didn’t have a very good understanding of the
tools and effects of Photoshop. Whereas evidently from my final piece I’ve gained a much better
understanding of these and have applied it to my piece to create a much more genuine realistic
product. I’ve learnt how to edit images to make them look professional by using editing tools like,
surface blur and changing the colour contrast which adds effects that makes the skin look smoother
and the overall image lighter or darker to fit the look of the cover. Learning about the layering has
helped me progress massively as I could now edit my image on another page and then add the layers
together making it much easier to get the image up to the standards I wanted it, without messing it
up and having to start all over, instead all I had to do was delete that layer and try it again, which
saved a lot of time.
I thought about styling more when I made my full product, because I had to make my magazine
relevant to the genre of music I was trying to achieve, and the terminology that I used in my cover
lines to make it appeal to my demographic profiles. I learnt from using Photoshop to create my full
product how to align the texting correctly and rescale this, this was quite important because I didn’t
want my full product to look as plain as my preliminary task, and I needed it to look more structured
in order to be appealing and work effectively.
Whilst creating my preliminary task for my College magazine I had no knowledge on how to use the
layers to enable me to have the correct text alignment. This was very useful to practice afterwards,
because when creating my full product I was then able to position my text and images in the correct
places, in comparison to my text laying over my image in my preliminary task. In comparison to my
full product you can clearly recognise that in my preliminary task I haven’t used a range of colours or
fonts to make my product look orderly and interesting and you can evidently see that I had no
understanding in my preliminary task of what sections I needed to include for an effective contents
page, because I had no structure to it and didn’t stick to the forms and conventions, like using a
variety of images or a clear colour scheme and layout.
My research methods of collecting magazines and looking at the organisation and structure of them
was useful because I had not done this before my preliminary task work and it gave me a clearer
understanding of how to go about using the forms and conventions of a real media product.