Draft-7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the school magazine task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

Before I started this process I had little knowledge on how to create a professional looking magazine and had never used a lot of the technology involved either. I had never used Photoshop to put together an A4 display and so I had to learn how to use all of the different functions within that as well as learning what I should and should not include in a professional magazine. When I started to make my preliminary magazine I used Interview magazine as a style model which meant I had some idea of what a good magazine looks like however it did not follow the common conventions seen within a lot of music magazines. For instance, the shot I decided to go for, from copying this magazine, was a mid-long shot which meant I had a lot of empty space on my magazine cover which meant it looked bare and unfinished. Also, it meant I used a coloured background which another uncommon convention and so made my magazine more unusual and unprofessional. Although I was able to use the same camera as I used on my final magazine I was unsure on how it worked and how to properly use the lighting for the image so I took the images as they were set out and as a result they were not as good as they could have been. Furthermore, I cut around the image which meant I used a tool I was not very familiar with which meant the image did not look very clean cut nor did it fit well with the rest of the magazine. If I had used an image with the background included I feel this could have worked better and produced a more professional magazine.
 
I was unable to do research into the target audience for this magazine and so I had little idea to what I wanted the cover model to do or to wear. As a result of this she wore her own clothes which led to little styling towards the genre or target audience of this magazine (for a school). I was able to use props to add mise en scene and develop the idea of the school magazine but the weren't very prominent and so the effect was subtle. The choice of colours for my magazine were simple but they did not work well with the choice of background colour as they were not contrasting enough so, the second line of my masthead does not stand out. I was pleased with how I added the cover lines however now, looking back, I would have either made them closer to the bottom within that box as they do not appear to fit to the edge. Or, I would have made the text black and had them on top of the actual background so it did not look as random with the black rectangle. The bar code on the cover was too large and I have now learnt to recognise that through my research of actual music magazines and from the creation of my magazine. The contents page layout, although a good idea to position around the image as Mojo magazine does, does not fit well as text overlaps and so should have been corrected. Also, I have learnt that the title 'contents' should either have been something different, the title of the magazine for example, or made smaller and fitted with reference to the rest of the page.

 

From creating my final magazine I have learnt that most magazines have very small text, something that I did not consider on my preliminary magazine or early drafts of my final magazine. This allowed me to add a lot more information, to my contents page in particular, and so would have been helpful to me in my preliminary as it may have fitted around the image better. I have also learnt how to display the banner (information about the magazine such as price, issue number etc.) so it is discrete yet available to the reader. This information needs to be small and to fit in with the rest of the magazine, like I have done in my final magazine. I have also learnt to consider the colours used in the magazine not only on the cover page but throughout the magazine making them link to the cover. For instance, in my final magazine I took a colour from the artist's shirt on one of my biggest images and used this throughout to identify the same magazine. I also kept the background colour the same one from the image as learnt from my preliminary. Moreover, I learnt how to use the styling to identify the target audience and to show genre of my magazine through using the same kind of clothes identified as that genre (tassels and shorts as seen in my magazine). Overall, I believe I have learnt through the research I have conducted what a good magazine looks like and the conventions of it to include when creating my own magazine. I have learnt that a good image can make a magazine page either really good or really bad and so the work needs to go into the magazine from this early stage.