Fonts To Use For Magazine

Addressing My Audience: Contents Page

DRAFT MUSIC CONTENTS PAGE.
Originally uploaded by Sophie Maas

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Original Images For El Amor

Final Front Cover, Contents, Article Page

Skills Development

From the preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

• Having a preliminary task helped me get started with the basic tools on Photoshop such as cropping, scaling and rotating an image, selecting texts and different backgrounds and also uploading images onto the page and the use of layers.
• For my main task my audience are far more specified being part of a sub-culture, than the preliminary task, which meant that I had to research about real magazines that were similar to help me. This included: what type of fashion, food/drink, technology, and hobbies they like. To help me remember the audience profile of my target audience I made a moodboard full of images that related to their likes.
• The design of my magazine had to fit the pyschographic group to give it it's own identity. However, for my preliminary task I had a broader audience because I was targeting all types of teenagers attending a college. Because of this I was able to make the design of my magazine attractable for everybody, maybe even staff.
• For my college magazine the contents in it were mainly about exams, careers, events, gossip and some fashion. However the main task was dominately about music and lifestyle.
• Although I wasn't confident using Photoshop doing the prelimiary task, doing a photography course meant that I was using it more frequently and gradually getting better at using layers and different tools. I found trying to get the same colour/fill continuously throughout different pages after changing to a different colour was difficult. But after experimenting with different tools I finally understood how to do it. This meant that I could have exactly the same colour to keep the identity of the magazine the same.
• Another skill that I picked up on was using a drop shadow, I used this on my masthead for my college magazine and most of the text on my main task. I found that the drop shadow made the magazine look more professional and it made the text stand out from the background.
• Using layers to make the magazine was a crucial aspect of it coming together. Having different layers meant that you could edit anything on its own. I had to use layers on both tasks and they allowed me to use pretty much any tool to alter unwanted parts.
• Another tool that I used quite frequently was the cropping tool, with this tool, I could crop any image to a desired size. The cropping tool was very handy when I wanted to delete parts of an image and I relied on it rather a lot.
• I used text alignment rather a lot in both magazines. I done this so that the text was not all in a straight line, and in a row. Text alignment allows you to be more creative with the text and wrapping the text also helps it look more interesting and fun.<>
• To make my main task magazine look more professional, I thought it was important that I payed attention to the detail and all the conventions of a real magazine to boost its retail ability. This meant that I had to include a barcode, date and price, a website, features/regulars, and my writtens skills.
• Because my college magazine wasn't going in shops to buy, I could make the magazine as creative and different as I liked. I wanted to the magazine to look like an actual student had done it because I think that it would appeal to them a lot more and they would want to know who done it. I did not use my journalism skills on the preliminary task because a double page spread was not required, but the headlines and contents page can be apart of it.

Overall, making the college magazine was a huge help and a great starting point of making a magazine. I did not consistently use the generic conventions of mainstream magazines on my preliminary task, which therefore I had to learn about when doing my main task. I think that the constructing part of the magazines was not so hard, but thinking of the design, layout, colours, content and subject matter was the hardest parts of task. I think from my college magazine that my music magazine is a huge improvement and looks similar to a real life magazine.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

First of all I used Google to help me research about mainstream magazines and the layouts and conventions that they use to construct their magazine. I also used Google to research about the institutions of magazine publishers to help me select the best suited publisher for my own magazine. I also used Google to help me find images that were used for my moodboards etc. I thought Google was very good; allowing me to research everything that I needed.

I have also been using Flickr to upload images and also my magazine cover and pages so that I could annotate them using notes. I also analysed real magazines as part of the course. Flickr was okay but sometimes the images wouldn't upload on to it.

I have been using Blogger so that I can upload all of my work that I have done. These include my research of other magazines, intial ideas, development and planning and also my finished products for the main task and my evaluations. I thought Blogger was really good and it has successfully allowed me to upload and write all my work so far.



Photoshop

I used Photoshop to create and construct all of my magazine pages, including the layout, font, images and theme and colours. Doing the preliminary task helped me learn the basics of constructing a magazine, which I didn't understand how to do it before. I especially learnt how to use rulers, mainly on the DPS to format the columns of text and make sure that my magazines' layout was precise and accurate like a real magazine. I also learnt how to edit my images, such as cropping them and rotating them to fit onto the page but also make them look professional at the same time. To do this I clicked on 'Edit' then 'Transform' and a list of editing the image comes up. I have also learnt how to edit the colourings of the image such as changing the contrast; to do this you click on 'Edit' then 'Adjustments' and then 'Brightness/Contrast', for my front cover image I turned the contrast of the image up on it so that the colours didn't look so flat and they really stood out. I feel that by using an essential piece of technology I have learnt a lot from it, I found that the more I practised at it the better the results of my work was.

Photoshop was very reliable and I managed to create everything I wanted.

Photography

To help me with constructing my magazine I have had to take any image that I wanted to include myself, this is to prove that I am not copyrighting images and that the magazine I have created is entirely my own work. I have an interest in photography so imagining the images that I wanted to capture wasn't very hard for me. I took all of the images in an outdoor setting because I wanted to have natural lighting and I didn't want my model to look too 'posed'.

Institutions

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

The genre of my magazine's target audience is small, however it is becoming more popular, so I believe that I should have a medium publisher, I think that I should publish through Dennis because they do not have any magazines that are similar to mine and therefore there would be no competition between the magazines. Dennis Publishing is one of the world’s leading independent publishers, founded in 1974.

What are the advantages/disadvantages with going with a big company?

Depending on the target audience you are looking for, you have to decide how much you want your magazine to be advertised. For instance if you had a mainstream magazine you would most likely publish with IPC or Bauer. Both of these publishers are massively popular. There is a disadvantage with going with a large company, and this is having no total control of choice, these may include: the colours may not come out how you want them to, what retailer they use and the company may make you pay as much attention to advertisers as you do to your audience in order to maximise your profits.

Although there advantages of having a large company and these are, having a wide audience for your magazine- resulting in more money, and having to pay a smaller price than you would if you were publishing your own magazine.I could also advertise my magazine in creative, independent cafes, pubs, shops and galleries through the use of leaflets on subscriptions, postcards, and posters. These would be the places to advertise because they support the creativeness of my magazine.

Synergys

As my magazine would be independently published and not mainstream there would not be a huge amount of synergy such as t.v programmes or radio shows as the target audience would be too small. However it may have a sister website with extra information about featured bands and links to video clips or gig listings.