Evaluation Question 7 Progression

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

Preliminary Task (School Magazine Right) and Indie Rock Music Magazine (Left)

I think overall I have made a large improvement within creating a magazine. Throughout my coursework I have expanded my use of other programmes and gained more knowledge on how to edit images and access different ways of presenting my work. During the research period of the project I started to improve my understanding of how the audience and magazine coincide and the relationship between audience and the magazine itself.
The preliminary task does represent its purpose of being a school magazine, shown by the main image and cover lines. However the font for the masthead is too simple and doesn't really stand out. Compared to the final draft of our music magazine, the masthead has improved as it now eye-catching and the reader is drawn in by the bold typography and colours. I think we have successful embodied our genre and audience by choosing this image as the main image as well as the house style of font and the masthead. I think overall the main image for our Indie Rock magazine is better than our preliminary task as it is more eye-catching and will intrigue readers more. I think we have successfully fulfilled the audience and preferences of the social-group. I think we have definitely appealed to our audience by using a young model on the front cover, as majority of our audience was younger. I am happy with the results and how we have improved our magazine cover form the preliminary task. I think elements of our preliminary task have been included in our final product, for example the cover lines layout we have continued to use throughout the process. The final product has a more professional element to it as we have also included a barcode to the bottom left as well as the price and issue number. This overall has added a professional and authentic look to the front cover.
When starting the project with the preliminary tasks, overall I hadn't really worked on programmes such as InDesign, Adobe Bridge and Pages before. Therefore when creating our Preliminary front cover I found it a long and confusing process as I wasn't familiar with the programmes and the tools which we were meant to use in them. Our preliminary task was created on pages, and this was a new programme for us. We learned how to work this programme and then towards the end of the process of our Music Magazine, we were able to create our final front cover easily. As well as other mock ups, we used Pages and InDesign. InDesign was also a new programme to us and we learned how to this programme with ease towards the end of the process.
There were some difficulties we had come across when uploading certain posts to our blogs. For example, at the start of the preliminary task I worked on Microsoft word and Powerpoint. When uploading my work to my blog I found that I wasn't able to upload the work in this format. Therefore I would either upload the post as a full written piece, or I would screenshot the document and upload the work as a picture. This is evident in my older posts. Throughout the process I have be able to vary my work and upload it in different formats. This has also let me show how my skills have developed and I have experimented and learned throughout the process. We also developed by using programmes such as InDesign for our double-page spread and our contents page. We were able to use the tools and programme with greater knowledge.

During the process, we carried out two Photoshoots. This was because after our first Photoshoot, we decided that the images we had taken didn't fit the image we wanted to portray on our front cover. We included images from the first Photoshoot in our magazine, however we decided to carry out another shoot in order to produce better images. The shots from our second shoot then formed the final front cover. This shows we were still learning during our process and learnt how to improve our work and understand how to create an better look for our magazine overall. 

Our research of music magazines helped us create a stylish and eye-catching magazine. During our preliminary task we didn't really research much into school magazines. This came at a disadvantage as we weren't sure what the general conventions of a school magazine. However we did slight research towards the end of the preliminary task and then we were able to apply our research to the final product. Therefore we aimed to improve this during the Music Magazine task. We spent a long time during the research process and we wanted to create a magazine which would appeal to our audience. We made sure to scope out our audience and what were their interests, we would use this information to apply it to our magazine. Also being fans of the indie rock genre, we were able to apply our likes and dislikes to the magazine as we were apart of our target audience. However we were aware that our likes and dislikes were not universal and made sure we didn't make our magazine biased towards us. We also spend time researching other companies such as Bauer and IPC, as they produce lots of well known magazines. We took inspiration from other magazines which fit our genre. This meant we fit general conventions as much as we could and this shows we have improved our research process as well as analysing what would best appeal to our target audience.
My analysis overall on my posts and pieces of work have developed a lot during my progress. It is evident in my past work in the preliminary task I have developed my analytical skills. For example looking at my Survey Analysis of the preliminary task compared to my Survey Analysis regarding my music magazine, there is a major difference between my analysis. I have developed and shown how we will have used the information in order to make our magazine better. Whereas in the preliminary task I only posted the results from the website in which I created the survey on. I also posted some of my results in different formats such as pie charts. This shows a versatility in my work and how I have developed.