Looking back at your preliminary task,

what do you feel you have learnt in the

progression from it to the full product?

Birte G. Barsch

The stages of making my magazine

I went through three main phases while making my magazine these were

Research- Audience, Market

Planning- Pitch, style sheet, photography plans, flat plan, draft layout

Production- Photography, image manipulation, text manipulation, layout manipulation.

What did I learn from research:

For the first part of the task, where we had to make a college magazine, I did not do any particular research about the audience as I just assumed that they would be interested in similar things like what I’m interested in as I would fit into the target audience.

Since then I have got to know that the more research you get done about you’re target audience the better you will know what they will like and dislike and therefore be able to create a magazine that appeals to them. So by asking both individuals and large groups what they think about certain things you will be able to create a magazine fitting with your audience.

What did I learn from research:

By doing the publisher research I learned how other companies approach the audience and whether they are successful with it. I also got to know that there are many ways of approaching the same type of magazine. Rocksound and Kerrang! For instance are apealing to the same audinece but while Kerrang! Is promoted strongly by Bauer Media, Rocksound wants to stay an edgy and unpromtoed magazine. By looking at that it made me think which one I would go with.

I also looked at magazines that could be competitive against mine and analysed them in order to find conventions that I could apply to my magazine. Like for instance the use of strong colours like red and yellow.

Professional

Mine

What did I learn from planning:

I have learned that planning is a vital part of creating your magazine as it makes it easier for you to organise your time

For my college magazine I had not planned anything and was there for stuck with an idea that didn’t really fit the photograph and cover line ideas I had.

For my primary task I made photography plans to help remind me how I wanted my photographs to look. I made a flat plan so that I knew what to include in my contents and on my front cover as well as creating a pitch and a draft to create a clear idea of how I wanted my magazine to look. I think all of this helped me create a magazine that looks well composed and thought through.

What I learned form producing

One of the primary things I learned form producing is creating a pleasing aesthetics. This mainly means producing something that is pleasing for the audience too look at. As far as it goes for my magazine this includes how my photographs, layouts and texts work together to create one magazine.

For my college magazine I only used Adobe Photoshop, while for my Primary task I used both Photoshop and Adobe InDesign. I did this because I find it easier to manipulate and change the layout of a page in InDesign than in Photoshop. I did however use Photoshop to manipulate my photographs. I think that the combination of these two programs created a more pleasing aesthetics than only using Photoshop.

College magazine

Music magazine

What I learned from producing

Another thing I learned from producing the magazine is how to use the technology. Even though I had used Photoshop before, I had never used it to manipulate photographs. I used quite a lot of time working with these programs so I improved quite a lot since the preliminary task.

I got introduced to a lot of technology I had not used before during my final production. I had for instance never used survey monkey before but found that it was quite useful to gather information about my target audience.

I had also not used Blogger that much before. However I thought it was a very easy and fast way to present all of my work at once.