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?

Here are my front cover and contents for both pieces, premilinary task on the left and main task on the right as you can see straight away the images on the left are very basic and look very tatty, for example the picture of the cover on the left is when I had just started out on photoshop and was still learning how to cut an image, as you can see it is very tatty and there a pieces missing out of the image and still bits of white background, this is because I only knew how to use the magic wand tool back then. The title is very basic on the left hand side image where as on the right it is how a magazine should be, big and bold and standing out to start off with I just went for fancy fonts but after using photoshop for a while I learnt that you can do all different things to the text such as put a drop shaddow on it or pull the text out a bit so it has a border on it which is what I have done with my music magazine cover. Also on my first magazine cover I have used big block colours as I didnt know how to use colour very well on photshop but now I know how to put an effect on and select certian colours or just change the contrasts which is what I have done with my final magazine, also the space I have learnt not to leave space on the cover of a magazine as it has to be attractive to the reader as it's all about first impression. Another good feature I learnt was how to create this black box and white lines which I have on my main music magazine cover which makes it look better than just having plain text on the cover.

For the two contents pages they are both very different my first one on the left is very simple and has a lot of block colour I feel a contents still need to have an image on which I have done with my final piece as it gives a better feel to it instead of just being text. From the left hand photo you can tell that I had just started using photoshop with how basic everything is, and the right hand side image looks a lot more professional as I have used a lot more photoshop features such as I have added a background too the image and changed the opacity to give a background that is not too heavy or light and it is better than being plain or having a block colour in there also I feel it is set out in a lot better manner with the main features on the right hand side of the page as that is where you automatically look with all this text and layers I didn't want to move anything to mess it up, so I used a new skill I had learnt which was to link certain layers together so that when you move one they all move, this helps as I wanted to keep it as a block of text and nothing can be messed up this way, it also makes it a lot less confusing as you have to have a different layer for each peice of text

I feel that my research and planning method's have come on leaps and bounds to where as before designing my college magazine I just found a template cover or contents and based my work around that just placing for example a square block and just putting my own on, but with my music magazine I actually looked around the internet for a number of different magazines and took ideas from each instead of just finding one and copying it out.