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?

Here are two of products in this course. The left picture is my preliminary work creating a College Magazine Cover and on the right is my finished music magazine cover. Personally, I can very easily see the differences in quality between the two images. Before creating the college cover I had never touched Photoshop and and you can see that in the picture. Compared to my now finished music cover, you can tell this one is a lot better in every way.

I instantly notice the use of certain fonts on each of the covers. The college cover seems like not much thought was taken in choosing the font, however, in the other cover you can see more effort has been out in, where I selected relevant fonts that somewhat complimented the cover, didn't look out of place and suited the genre of the magazine (Dj'ing music). I also notice the colouring on the college cover and see how it's lacking and seems a bit bland and boring. In my newer cover I made the colours and they appear a lot brighter on the page. They are also useful when a person first looks at the cover, drawing their eye to certain parts of the cover and you want their attention to be focussed on.

I also developed my skills in using pictures. In the college cover, I decided at the time to use one photo and fit it to the whole where as in the music magazine cover I thought it would look better with one photo cut out from its background and I later added the coloured effects coming off the back of it. The effects are actually a copy of the photo, but with a colour overlay, something that I wouldn't have known how to do when doing my college cover which in itself shows my progress using the software.

Within photoshop I used a tool called 'blending options'. On both of my products I used the effect of a drop shadow. This makes the item stand out from the background, giving it a 3d effect. However, my use of the blending options in my music magazine cover is a lot more subtle and discrete. This makes it less noticeable and easy on the eye. This is definitely something I learnt from the result of my college magazine cover.

A final point on my covers, I have developed my understanding of magazine cover layouts immensely. The college cover was laid out very poorly, with two coverlines slapped on the side without have any kind of main coverline. My main cover however, has been planned out and has a much more structured lay out and is over all a lot better. I think knowledge came from analysing other professional magazine covers and taken ideas from a lot of them and applied them to my own to get the best effect possible using my current skill set.