Evaluation Question 6

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

When designing and creating my music magazine, I have used various forms of technology and software to help me through the whole production process, as shown by the smilebox below:

As you can see throughout my coursework I have used a wide variation of technology and different pieces of software. If I were to do this again I would have used more pieces of technology, for example I would have used youtube and animoto to make my work look more wide spread and better. Some of the technology that I have used in the progress of creating my magazine I have used before, PowerPoint and photoshop, so I already had a little bit of experience. The main pieces of software I have used are the iMac's and a camera. The camera was used to take all of the photos and the iMac was used to do all of my research/planning and everything digital. The two pieces of software that I used most would have to be Photoshop and Blogger. I used photoshop to create my magazine and edit my photos. I used blogger to edit and create my blog posts.

I have previously used photoshop when I was in school, yet what I had learnt was just the basics so when it came to the point of doing for my music magazine it would not be enough to be a sufficient music magazine. As a result of this I have had to learn a lot more about photoshop, I learnt more about Photoshop by watching videos on YouTube and spending more time on Photoshop. As you can see below are two front covers one for a college magazine and one is my near to complete music magazine front cover. The college magazine was my first attempt at a front cover for a magazine. You can see that there is a big difference from the two, through time I have developed my photoshop skills. For example the font needs variation otherwise it would not follow conventions from real music magazines. The font is all the same in the college magazine as is the colours of the font. Compare this to my dance magazine where I have used more fonts and a variation of different font colours. Before I could edit my photos on photoshop, I had to actually take the photos. I did so in a photo studio at Sunderland University. What I had learned from that is that there is a huge difference in the quality of photos compared to taking a photo on a mobile phone. So once I entered the studio I had to grasp the concept that it was a hard device to learn all about straight away. So it took me some time to understand fully how to work the camera, once I was capable of using the camera professionally I cracked on with taking the photos that I needed for my covers in my magazine. The photos that I had taken are a huge difference to the ones that I have taken on my mobile phone, you can see the difference as I used a mobile phone for the photos on my college magazine. This has all been very effective as they have helped me improve my final products.