Overall, the author feels they learned a lot from the mistakes made in their preliminary college magazine that helped them improve their music magazine. Some key lessons learned included using more professional fonts, limited and coordinated color schemes, tightly packed layouts with no empty spaces, inclusion of important details, and following the flat plan design. The improved magazine had a more cohesive brand identity through consistent fonts, colors, and design elements.

1. Looking back at your preliminary
task, what do you feel you have
learnt in the progression from it
being a full product?
Evaluation Question 7

2. Comparison

3. Overall
Overall I feel I have made a much better magazine with my music magazine than with
my college magazine, as I learnt so much and made a lot of mistakes with my college
magazine that I did not make with my music magazine as I learned from them.
I feel I have improved with my font size, fonts used, colours used, layout and general
details.
In my college magazine I did not include the important information such as the date,
price and barcode etc which was a big mistake as it meant my magazine looked very
unrealistic.
Spelling was also something I made a mistake on with my college magazine as I
accidently wrote “come to out” rather than “come to our”. On my music magazine I
made a conscious effort to get my spelling perfect and I proof read my work to make
sure I did not make any further mistakes.

4. Colour Scheme
In my student/college magazine I used a variety of different bright colours paired with a
very subtle background, also some of my images were half black and white/half colour or
distorted colours. The mix of all these colours left my student magazine looking quite
messy and unorganised, which was a disadvantage. I feel the magazine looked very childish
with all the different colours. I picked colours that related to the colours of the college in
my preliminary task, but I feel this just made my magazine look to garish and overrun with
unnecessary colours, especially seen as the colours used were very bright.
Therefore, in my music magazine I chose to use a very limited amount colours, to make my
magazine look more professional. I mainly used red and gold through out my magazine
(alongside black and white) but for the front cover I chose to also use a pop of blue for the
cover lines and puff. I felt this would make my magazine just that little bit more interesting
and make it stand out more.
I kept the majority of the descriptive writing black as it is easy to read and also stands out
from the coloured background.

5. Font and Font Size
When I created my college magazine I was unaware of websites such as DaFont.com which allow
you to download custom fonts to use with in Photoshop, therefore the fonts on my college
magazine were quite basic as they were ones that were prebuilt into Photoshop. I also used all
of the same font and font size on the cover of my student magazine (except for the masthead),
which again made it look unrealistic and unprofessional.
In my music magazine I downloaded the font ‘Human Error’ from DaFont.com which gave me a
unique looking masthead which stood out, and looked professional as it was not a font from
PowerPoint. For the masthead on my music magazine I chose to have it only cover half of the
front cover as it was too large and did not look right when it covered the whole top of the
magazine as I also had a banner above it. This was different to my student magazine as I made
the masthead fit the whole top of the cover, I did not feel this worked very well though as the
masthead was still quite small.
For my cover lines and main sell line I used a variety of different font sizes as I wanted some
parts to be more eye catching than others. This worked better than on my college magazine as
on the cover of my college magazine no parts really stood out as the same font and font size was
used throughout.

6. Layout
I did not really stick to the flat plan for my college magazine as I
changed the layout of where the images were place and some
of the text. This was not a good idea as it meant I had no guide
to follow when creating my magazine. Therefore, I made sure to
follow the flat plan accurately when creating my music
magazine and I feel this made my magazine more successful.
In my college magazine there was a lot of
blank spaces as I did not place the images
in good places, which made my magazine
look quite barren. Also the cover lines did
not fit in the coloured boxes well and there
was a lot of empty space.
To improve this in my music magazine I
created tightly packed flat plans which
made sure there was no empty spaces.

7. Comparison

8. Layout and Content
The layout was one of the things I was most unhappy with in my college magazine as feel it
looks very unprofessional and does not resemble any magazine I have seen before. Having
the images above the features column did not work well so on my music magazine I made
sure to have them at the side rather than above.
In my music magazine I also added a lot more features as in my college magazine I only had
five listed, which is not very many for a magazine. I also did not include the word ‘page’
before the page number in my music magazine as I felt it was unnecessary as my target
audience would understand what the numbers meant.
I included social media links in my music magazine as I know my target audiences are
regular social media uses and I felt it was important to let them engage with the magazine
on different media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

9. Continuity
There isn't much continuity in my student magazine as I used bright and bold colours
on my cover but then more muted and pastel colours for my contents page. This
makes it look more like the cover and contents are from two different magazines. I
also did not use the same text for both pages, the only text I kept was the text from
the masthead as I used it for the word ‘contents’ . The masthead was not included on
my contents page and so I felt continuity was something I really lacked with my
student magazine and wanted to have with my music magazine.
In my music magazine I used the same colour scheme throughout, although I did not
include the colour blue on my contents page or DPS (but this was as the blue was
simply to attract my target audiences attention). I used the same base font
throughout, whilst adding other fonts in some places so that my magazine did not only
use one font. I feel by keeping these aspects the same throughout my music magazine
I have been able to create a brand identity and people will now associate the colours
used/fonts used/my masthead with my magazine.

10. Details
When creatign my student magazine I wasn’t really sure what small details to include
in my contents page therefore I just created soemthing quite basic which was not very
realistic.
I tried to add in lots of little details to my music magazine’s contents page which I had
noticed in other magazines such as a website, social media links, image captions and
page numbers. I feel this makes my magazine look genuine as I have included all of the
little things which other magazines also include.

11. Reflection
I feel as though I have learned a lot from creating my two magazines, and I feel my music
magazine would not be as successful if I had not made the mistakes that I did with my student
magazine as I really learned new things from them.
Since my prelim task I have became more able with Photoshop and I am now able to edit images
to a higher quality and I have also learned what makes a magazine more successful through trial
and error.