Evaluation: Skills development

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 creating the college magazine i have developed an understanding of many of the crucial forms and conventions of standard magazine design, this includes the use of layout and photography as well as written journalism. My college magazine was amateur and had no relation to any existing product which made it unsuitable. My development of my college magazine how to properly structure an audience questionnaire that i then refined and modified to be appropriate for my music magazine.

Through research i learnt that it is much more interesting to design a magazine which features a range of different photography angles and distances. I took a range of shots in order to make my publication appear more professional. I learnt more about niche audiences from this research and feel i learnt how to find my audience and adapt my journalism to what my audience would want to read. I tried to make my audience feel like a priviledged few as research into my genre brought out the severe lack of publications available to the audience.

I learnt how to find existing products and analyse the points that compliment the audience and also how an audience can be presented/attracted through the design of the magazine. i tried to replicate this effect with my own magazine using my refined skill with the technology of photoshop i was able to create a much more conventional magazine that was based on an existing product so that there are elements to it that appear natural as if the magazine existed on the market. While designing my music magazine feedback helped me to develop my idea as there were times where the arangement of page sections or the saturation of imagery was not up to standard and i was then able to edit the magazine to work appropriately. also the members of my target audience also helped me to blend the design into something that they would be interested in seeing but without alienating it from existing products. For this to work i had to be very thorough with how i designed each step of my magazine rather than just creating it how i thought it would work best. I developed my magazine in great detail making sure everything was exactly as it should be in terms of colour, position and style.

The layout design of my magazine was relatively straightforward but i think the journalism was the harder section to create. I had to change my article because it was not efficiently 'news-worthy' but i think that my current article is much more insightful and could be considered a genuine story featured in a new music magazine. the quality of my written text in the music magazine is greatly improved upon the college magazine in terms of my audience but the preliminary task helped to find the weak points and improve them.

I think that i have developed my design skills greatly since the preliminary task and have created a magazine that could be real. The whole process from concept to reality has been extremely fluid because of the design skills i have learnt from the preliminary task and the research into the specific publishing industries, processes and conventions. I feel competent that i have created an effective product but one that could be improved further now that i have experienced the production process.