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?

When creating my preliminary task (college magazine), my knowledge of Photoshop was very limited, however in my finished product my Photoshop skills were much better. I leared how to control the layers and edit the contrast, brightness and levels in images in order to make them more appealing, which was something I didn't do in my preliminary task. Doing this, it makes my magazine appear more realistic and similar to a professional product which my preliminary task magazine doesn't.

I also learnt how to digitally colour an image, which I have done in the image on my feature article. I did this as it is a mix of black and white, and colour in one photograph, and it is the fifth image in the magazine, while two of the other four are in colour and two are black and white. To do this, I created a hue/saturation layer mask on the image, and dragged the saturation down to 0. Having done this, I used the brush tool and changed the colour to black, and brushed over where I wanted to bring back the colour which was the models dress and hair. I also feel that doing this strengthened the image and made it more interesting than it was previously as it is something unique in my magazine. The colours of the original image link to those in the rest of the magazine, and so I wanted to emphasise them by digitally colouring the image so that the only noticable difference between the final image and the original are that the colours are brighter and the models arms are in black and white.

Another factor of progression is that having created different moodboards, such as a target audience moodboard and an advertisements moodboard, I knew what my target audience would be looking for in a magazine as well as how they would want it to look. In accordance to this, I followed the conventions of popular music magazines such as Q evidently, however changed the design slightly to make it unique. Many other popular music magazines focus on young generations wanting to buying them which may make it more difficult for my magazine to sell, however due to slightly altering the design to make it more unique this may be a factor which largely contributes to the sales of the magazine. Also, having done research through surveys, I found out what some members of the target audience would look for in a magazine like my own, and this helped me decide what I needed include in my magazine and the types of artists to feature in it. While I didn't want to copy popular music magazines, I didn't want to avoid the codes and conventions in case this made the magazine unappealing to readers, so I chose to create my own artists which would be seen as low-profile rather than featuring bigger, better known names like Lady GaGa and P!nk.

When writing my double page spread, I wanted to create a relaxed atmosphere which was relateable for the target audience. I did this by avoiding the use of slang to make it more formal, and writing it as it would be spoken rather than having a heavily edited body of text. This is relateable as the audience are female high school or college students, and therefore they would be relatively relaxed and intelligent and prefer to read something properly rather than in slang, so I tried to make it well written to attract my target audience as well as targeting others who aren't necessarily associated with them.