Jess Mcknight AS Media

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

After completing both my student magazine and my music magazine I can see a definite clear difference in my work. This was down to not being able to use the software and programs at the beginning it was more of a ‘trial run’ and I just to get used to what was actually going to be available to us to use in order to make our product conventional.

After looking back at my skills audit I can now safely say that I can:

- Use a mac

- Open an application via finder

- Scan images in onto the mac

- Create and upload recent entries to my blog

- How to apply the rule of thirds correctly in terms of positioning for images

- Use indesign

- Use photoshop

- Add special effects to make text and images look more effective and more aesthetic

You can clearly see that in my music magazine all of the spaces are filled there is hardly any blank spaces at all. One that stands out in particular is the contents page, in my student magazine there was a lot of space and it didn’t really fit together and like up to create a full page. However after learning from that mistake I took that into consideration and decided to make more images and more text to stop this happening. If you look at my music magazine contents page you can see that there is no space at all and it looks extremely conventional as I used it alongside Q magazine whilst I was creating it so I always had something to follow and look back on to make sure that it was all fitting the way it should in terms of a conventional layout.

If you look back at my student magazine front cover you can clearly see that it has been put together by a student as all the text boxes are still visual and also they don’t link in together they just all sit hanging there is nothing that actually connects it all up together. However looking at my front cover I really like it I feel that it looks very conventional I like how its turned out so much that I feel my student magazine was a fail, but on the other hand I just put it down to practise I wasn’t expecting my first attempt to be brilliant I was expecting it to turn out how it has now. I don’t mind that it didn’t really look that good because you can see the clear improvement from the student magazine to my music one.

The photography is completely different I used the college’s camera when I took my front cover image for my student magazine and I hadn’t started using my DSLR in photography yet so it was all a blur to me I didn’t know anything about photography. I didn’t really even know about the rule of thirds. By the time I came to my photography on my magazine I had been on my AS photography course for nearly a whole year and had previously completed projects at a very high standard so I was then motivated by this to go out and take a range of images for my magazine, all of my images even the ones that didn’t come out so well I loved because they all have their own character and effect to them they all have their own meaning (otherwise I would have clicked the shutter to actually take the image).

I feel that on my student magazine I used all of the wrong fonts it was kind of a decision to use them because I felt a bit rushed for time ( a future improvement). The mast head on my student magazine looks like it has just been cut out of a website or out of paint this look is horrible and I don’t like it. Now understanding how to use indesign I got a font that I liked for the masthead (title of my magazine) It is both simple and straight forward.

Having had lots of time to look at the different conventions of a music magazine front cover, contents page and double page spread I have been able to clearly identify the dominant ideologies used and the entire standard conventions used in our world today.

I am extremely happy with how my final product has turned out and I don’t think that I could of done it any better If I tried however I do understand and appreciate that there is always room for improvement. I am very pleased that the more time I put In at home to make my front cover look right actually paid off. I feel that my contents page is virtually the same as the one from Q which was what I initially set out to do. My double page spread I based on an article from Q magazine I did this because Q magazine is very simplistic and conventional.

Overall I am very pleased with the work that I have produced and I hope to carry forward my knowledge to a future idea.