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

Throughout the course of creating my music magazine I have acquired various skills, I also learnt about the wide range of different technology used in the design and producing process of magazines.  With these new skills that have acquired throughout the design and producing process these skills I will be able to use in the future. Furthermore, the realisation of how long the process is of creating a magazine I have also learnt about, before I believed the process was short and simple however, now I have realised how long and detailed every step of creating a magazine is.

Blogger

Blogger in general has been used throughout the project, all my work is displayed in Blogger, including my research, planning and the media theories therefore I have used Blogger on significant occasions throughout my project. Furthermore I have also used Blogger in other projects so the knowledge that I already had on Blogger has been developed by this project.  How has it been developed? Well my knowledge on overall presentation of Blogger was pretty slim I have now learnt how to apply templates and make my work look presentable and as interesting as possible.

I decided to use this template and background from my blog making it look presentable and easy to read.

In addition when learning about Blogger I was able to apply labels to my pieces of work, this meant that my work was sorted into different labels.  My work was split up into 6 sections that are shown below:

I also incorporated pictures into my work on Blogger therefore I learnt how to upload pictures on Blogger. This I had already done in other projects so I had no problem uploading pictures

 In addition, audience feedback is also crucial for an encoder. My audience feedback was all done through blogger.

Corel draw

During the producing process Corel Draw was the programme I used to construct my front cover, double page spread and contents page. This programme was a suitable programme to use this was because of the wide range of fonts to choose from and the different formatting I could use to manipulate a perfect magazine with different formatting within for example my double page spread I was able to use certain formatting to imbed a banner within my interview.

Within my magazine I used a variety of different fonts, corel draw offered a wide range of different fonts that I could use that were appropriate to my overall theme. When choosing a font for my masthead I was able to find a bold font style that impacted on my front cover looking bold and standing out- this was down to the fact that the font of my masthead was perfect for creating a bold masthead.  Therefore I was able to find suitable fonts for different sections of my magazine.

 In addition another key aspect of why I chose corel draw was down the fact that objects within my page was easy to move, resize and also changing the order of the objects was also easy. By the click of a button the object could easily be moved to the back of the page. This made life easy for me when I began moving objects to see how I could make my magazine look better.

An advantage to using Corel Draw, is the basis of how easy Corel Draw is to import images. When constructing my front cover this made the process of importing pictures easier and less time consuming.

Another advantage of using Corel Draw is the fact you can edit pictures and bitmaps during the process of constructing a double page spread. If  I was not happy with my image and I opted to change my image using Corel Draw I would be able to change the image.

Although there was also a few problems using Corel Draw which at times I found frustrating.  Cropping pictures on corel draw compared to a program such as Photoshop was a lot harder it took a lot of time to crop my pictures and at times I also had to re crop to make sure my pictures were successfully cropped.  Another problem I had with using Corel Draw was creating my banners (known as bitmaps) were also relatively hard to create on Corel Draw and the step by step the I wasn’t happy with the overall result of what I had created using Corel Draw so I used Photoshop to create my banners which was a lot more effective and easy to use.  However Corel Draw as a whole was a very helpful program to use.

Camera

The images that were used in my magazine were taken on a Sony Cybershot the pictures weren’t professional however were of a pretty high quality. On my front cover I took one main photo which was edited however before the project started I already new how to take photos although I had no experience of taking photos at night and I wasn’t sure on how to edit photos. Therefore the project enabled me to take photos in the dark and learn about how to edit photos. The program I used to edit my photos was http://www.picnik.com/ in addition I also used Microsoft picture manager to edit my photos.

Internet

The internet was also a significantly important in my project without the internet I would have struggled to create a successful unique magazine.  I used the internet to research about other magazines, and how they were designed.  I also used the internet to find out about the different publishing companies and how to attract my target audience.  Furthermore the internet was also used to find out anything I was unsure of such to find out what was meant by the term “Conglomeration”.  The research was essential part of my project I feel using the internet helped me massively and has also helped my understanding of the media production world.