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?

From looking at the front cover of my preliminary task magazine and my final product magazine we can see that there is a big advancement in quality. The angle of the photograph for my preliminary task cover is not the best as it fails to show the model’s full face and only reveals a small bit of the location. The photo for my own music magazine is a interesting angle with the group of models split into two and the location is shown in a more developed and interesting way. The colours and layout of my final Unsound product are also of a better quality and the cover does not look as rushed and busy as that of my preliminary task. Layout was another key concern, and I needed to lay things out in a user-friendly way. On the Unsound cover I have included what is also in the magazine on the left hand side rather than at the bottom of the cover, this then gives the magazine more space and a better spacial flow. The effects utilised on the photograph are also better as I spent a large amount of time adjusting the levels of many different aspects of the photograph such as saturation and colours. Also I have not obstructed the main image of the magazine whereas my preliminary task cover has its image obstructed by a large banner spreading across the middle of the page.

From comparing both my front over and contents page of my preliminary task to my finished product it is easy to see that there is not a consistent font style on my preliminary task. My final product has a consistent choice of two relating fonts over both the front cover and contents page which helps give my magazine an edgy yet classier and less jarring feel. Also the colours of my front cover and contents page of my preliminary task do not flow and are too starkly different.

By looking at how the quality of my work has improved over the course of the project it is possible to see how my skills have developed especially with the use of Photoshop. Whilst creating my final product I was able to add drop shadow effect to my font and then a gradient overlay which look more professional and of a higher quality. I now understand how to adjust the angle, scale and blend mode of the gradient overlay and how to adjust what colour type it will be overlaid with. Another example of how my skills have developed is how I have experimented with different brushes in relation to my final product. For example I decided to brush the background of the font of my front cover with a smoke brush which helped make my font stand out from the page.

Another example of how I have developed and improved my skills throughout the project is how I have used cropping and the magic wand tool. These two tools help by letting me get rid of unwanted pieces of an image by simply highlighting what I want to keep. By looking at my preliminary task it only shows a basic knowledge of how to use these two tools whereas my final product shows a large amount of cropping which leads to more dynamic images. This can especially be seen in my content page as I had to crop into the photograph I took and remove the background from my image and then place the photograph onto a black background.

This leads to another tool that helped develop my skills was

the shape tool. From this I was able to construct simple rectangle shapes behind certain pieces of text which helped them stand out from the page, for example the yellow text placed upon a black rectangle on my contents page. I was also able to create simple lines using this shape tool which I was able to choose on my feature article to place around the quotations I decided to use, this helped me ensure that these quotations were closed off from the rest of the text. Compare this to my preliminary task and it is easy to see that I simply did not take full advantage of the tools that were at my disposal.