Question 7 what i've learnt from preliminary task
- 4. The first thing which I have learnt is that you should always make a plan first, drawing up a plan of my final magazine really helped as I believe it looks more professional and that I knew what I was doing compared to my preliminary magazine which looks like I thought about it on the spot, as of this I believe my final music magazine looks much better than my college magazine. The next thing which I learnt was how to comfortably and confidently remove the background from images, as you can see in my College magazine that I did not manipulate the main image at all, in my music magazine you can see that I removed the background all together. I’ve also learnt about different social groups and audiences which I would need to target, when I created the college magazine I only really needed to consider my age and people in college, however when making a music magazine you need to really consider everyone until you create a target audience. Props are very important in helping you show the target audience, even though I did not include a prop in my cover page main image I have learnt that from looking at my preliminary task that by using the folder prop it did really help determine the audience. Finally, I’ve learnt how to experiment more with fonts and drop shadows to help bring the masthead to life, in my preliminary magazine the masthead looks quite plain and doesn’t really stand off the page. However, in my music magazine the masthead really does stand off the page as I have implemented many different effects.
- 7. Something which I learnt was to always add the masthead onto your content page as well as the cover page, this is because it creates brand identity and helps the audience to remember your magazine. I did this on both my preliminary magazine and my final music magazine. I learnt that you must try to cover all of the space on the page or it would be called dead space, this makes your content page look unfinished and un professional and you can see by my preliminary magazine there was quite a lot of space left out, I believe on my music magazine there was no space which was left out. I learnt that including social media on the content page helps to determine your target audience, if you was to not include social media it would tend to be aimed at a more older generation. I included social media on both my preliminary magazine and my music magazine Finally, I have learnt the importance of adding some sort of border around the pictures on the content page, if you don’t do this then it could look like you’ve just place the images without any thought in it. As I have done this for both magazines I believe the image placements look quite good.
- 10. As this was the first time of creating a double page spread I learnt quite a lot, I thought at the start since I had not created a double page spread before that it would look quite bad. However, I do believe that it looks like a real double page spread and is quite good. One thing which I learnt while making the double page spread was that it is always important to write the article out on word before placing it onto InDesign. I also learnt that when you’ve placed the article it is sometimes very hard to read the article as the writing gets lost in the background, as of this I learnt to create a feathered shape and placed it behind the article. This fixed the issue but also looked really good. When taking my photos for the music magazine I initially believed that I was going to have around 3 pictures on the double page spread. However, when adding the photos onto InDesign I soon learnt that for a double page spread the simplest in terms of pictures is better, so therefore I stuck with the main image on the double page spread as the other pictures look as if they was randomly placed. I finally learnt how to create a drop cap and a pull quote, both of these are common conventions for a magazine so it was handy to learn how.