EVALUATION Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Music Magazine                                 School Magazine         

Looking back on my school magazine task it is apparent that I have made various changes and improvements to my style of magazine creation. Both my magazines share some regular conventions of a magazine such as a masthead placed at the top left of the page, a barcode at the bottom right of the page, an issue number, a date of the issue, a price and tagline located under the masthead. These features illustrate that I did have some understanding on the regular codes and conventions when I created my first magazine, the school magazine task, except this also shows how I have improved my knowledge on the features of a magazine front cover. The realistic subheadings I have on my music magazine portrays that I know the differences between a normal magazine and a music magazine. The background image of the artist doesn’t immediately indicate to the audience that it is a music magazine, but the text around it does. I decided to do this so that the image will attract my target audience to my music magazine front cover, then the text around that image will attract them to read my magazine.

There are many things that went well during this task. I believe production was the highlight of both tasks as I got to explore and learn more about Ulead Photoimpact 10, which is the photo editing software that I used throughout the coursework. In both magazine front covers I manipulated the dominant background images. For my "Citylife" magazine background image I used a black & white cartoon effect as I wanted the image to be distinctive and not plain. For my "GRIME TIME" magazine I added a grey fill effect in the background to make the artist's colourful clothing/costume stand out against the plain grey background. I already knew how to manipulate images before this project but I believe my photo manipulation skills have improved. My photo taking skills have also improved which is shown in the professional appearance of the image on my "GRIME TIME" front cover.

Real magazines on display in a shop

I used 2 of the same fonts in both of my magazines. "aaaiight" font is used for the masthead in my school magazine and used for the main story heading in my music magazine. The "Berlin Sans" font I used for the issue numbers, prices on both magazines. I have developed more understanding of the codes and conventions of the media products e.g. I specifically placed my magazine mastheads on the top left of the page, this illustrates my understanding of magazines as I know that the arrangement of magazines in most shops allow the reader to only see the top and left side of a magazine. I believe that all of these skills have assisted me to become the intelligent, talented media student that I am today. I didn't experience many big problems during this project. The only big problems I had was the difficulties of uploading my video to Youtube. When I found a way around this problem the evaluation questions became quite easier to answer.

School Magazine (Citylife)                              Music Magazine (GRIME TIME)