Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

College Magazine : Smudge

Music Magazine : 5th Avenue

Looking at my college magazine, I feel that it looks really cheap, really unprofessional, and just quite crap to be honest. I used way too much of the smudge tool and it just looks terrible. But this was when I was learning how to use Photoshop.

I then progressed onto the making of my music magazine. In the time in between, I had been thinking of ideas on how I wanted it to look somewhat different, because I wasn't happy with the college magazine, and because the college magazine was not in anyway related to music, so whatever happened it had to change.

I think the use of colour is a lot better on my music magazine because it makes the pages more interesting to look at (more appealing) and it makes the pages brighter too. My college magazine just used two colours really, pink and black. It looks really quite boring and it also makes the contents page look boring and unprofessional too. Also, you don't really notice the colours of the writing on the bottom of the page because the black and the pink overwhelm it.

However, i do quite like the effect of the background in the main photo. The way it is smudged makes it look really unnatural and as the cover line says, it's different, and that is exactly what it is. I also learnt how to stroke and change colour effects. This was one of the main tools i used on my music magazine and you can see from that on the masthead around 5th Avenue. The Yellow/Orange around the text is the stroke and you can use any colour possible for it. I also experimented with negative on a few draft ideas of the title. However, this would of meant that everything would of had to have been in negative so that the colours go with each other, otherwise it would of looked really bad.

The text inside the college magazine was really plain and basic writing. It was as if i was just taking detailed notes really. Whereas my music magazine had a lot of informally based text referring to my target audience. The attitude of the text would influence the reader to read further on in the mag. If the text was very boring, then they wouldn't even bother. I used words such as "Noobs" and I didn't mind using small swear word/expletives. These make it more entertaining to read, and they can relate to fun.

The attention to detail on my college magazine was very small. The only detail i really focused on was the smudging of the lines, when i should have focused on size, layout, graphics and colour. My music magazine took me hours and hours to complete. I put in a lot of time and the detail shows. Even little things had to be just right such as the amount of shadow showing on the main cover story headline, all the colours, and the positioning of everything in the contents page. Even as i look at it now the contents and double page spread could be changed slightly, and the bottom graphic on the front cover could have more detail on it but I ran out of time in production.

Also i look at my college magazine, and it is totally original. You can't really compare it to any other college magazine. But the reason for that is, because they are all better, and who in their right mind would produce one like that. My music magazine is original in some ways, such as genre specific music style (Post-Hardcore/Alternative). But it is also quite similar to Kerrang!. The layout of the contents page is quite similar to a typical K! contents page, but it just has a lot more colour. I wasn't afraid to go all out with the colour.

In short, I have learnt how to layout a front page, contents and double page spread, I have used numerous tools to improve the magazines look from the progression of college mag, to music mag, I have learnt how to write an informative article and present it on a page in a small amount of space and how to use colour to make the page look more appealing.

The progression from College Mag, to Music Mag has been massive.