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

To create my media product, I used Adobe Photoshop CS6. I used this program to design my magazine cover, contents page, and double page spread as well as editing my pictures. Using photoshop, I learned a range of techniques when editing my photographs in order to make them stronger and improve the asthetics, as well as designing the main media product. Some of the techniques I learned are changing opacity of shapes, and changing the contrast and levels of the images. I feel that doing this made the images more effective and more pleasing to the eye. Overall, using Photoshop made it easy to create the product rather than using numerous programs, though I did have some problems with it at the beginning due to lack of experience with the program which I eventually overcame. These are just some of the advantages of using Photoshop, although it does take time to get used to using it especially when you have never used it before. Some of the disadvantages are that it sometimes takes a while to save work from the program, and occasionally it freezes. In addition to Photoshop, I also used internet sites such as Blogger, DaFont and Survey Monkey to do my research and create my magazine.

Blogger is the site I used to post my finished product, it was also good to upload my preliminary task and other pieces of coursework, and the site was very easy to navigate having never used it before.

Survey Monkey was useful as all I had to do was sign up and then I could instantly create a survey. One disadvanage of this though, is that rather than the site sending the survey to a randomised selection of site members, I had to actively send a link to the survey via email to people. In addition to this, some of the people I sent the survey to did not complete the survey, making it harder to gather relevant data.

DaFont was extremely quick and easy to navigate, and has a wide variety of fonts to choose from. However, if you used a font from the website and then closed the window, unless you took note of the font name or downloaded the font, it became very difficult to find the right font again. This was also a disadvantage as rather than being able to download fonts due to computer accessability, we had to take screenshots and crop them, although this was made easier with the use of Photoshop.