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'.