Zenab Bukkar's Blog: October 2012

Evaluation for College Magazine

What Went Well?

During the making and creation of the college magazine, there were some positive and negative aspects as the journey exceeded into the final piece of the cover and content page. Some aspects that went well were the photography for the magazine, I had a complete image of how I wanted my magazine to look and I went for it. I followed the criteria of a medium close up shot, I used the 12mmp (Compat 12 million mega Pixel camera) I took two pictures for my front cover and had to choose one, so I chose the one that I thought showed depth and looked as if the model showed contact with the audience through her eyes inviting them in. I took other pictures around the college that would go in my content page, which showed the extra curriculums around the college and different buildings they were in, which I knew I could make reference to my headlines for the readers to know where to go to find out more information on the event. After taking all the pictures I needed, next step was to upload it to my documents and get started on my front cover on Photoshop. Another aspect that went well was Photoshop, when we was informed we had to use Photoshop for our front cover and InDesign for our content page I wasn’t very comfortable because I’ve never really used those software’s before but the introduction of Photoshop and InDesign in media helped a lot and I just learnt from there and experimented. Through the process of Photoshop first I had to set up the page and put the ‘rulers’ which the purpose for the ruler was to arrange everything to be placed against the ruler so the text would be symmetrical and be laid out to the edge of the page, I manipulated the image for the front cover to be placed right in the middle to attract the audiences view of the magazine. i laid out my page as Masthead at the top of the photo to shows its semiotic importance , I made the text of the masthead bigger than all of the other headlines and made the main story line second biggest to show the purpose of the relevance of magazines edition. I also toned out the lighting of the magazine to make a magazine lighting effect to show contract with the colour scheme.

Some negative aspects was finding the right colour scheme of the magazine, it was one of the hardiest things I had to do during the making. I tried all different colours but it just didn’t fit the imagine I was going for, sometimes the masthead colour would be perfect but then when I place the same colour for the headlines it either didn’t look the part or it was too hard to see because it clashed with the cover pictures colour. In the end I went with the colour I thought fitted the college image and the brightest colour that just highlighted the mains. Another negative aspect was making the content page on InDesign, I got a bit f the hang of it after a while but some parts of it still was tricky. The style of the wording of ‘content page’ I was inspired by the content page of vibe with Ciara as main picture, but it took me a while to lay it out and some of the photos I took around the college. I followed the colour scheme of my front cover to show the relation.

What do I need to improve on?

Improvement that I believe I need to concentrate on is understanding and developing on InDesign to get the full experience and understanding of how it works and to produce pieces of work on it to the best of my ability knowing my way around it. Another improvement I believe I need to concentrate on is layouts of magazines, which I believe I can concur if I do some research on styles of magazines and looking at the layouts of their page and understanding the semiotic meaning behind it. Also need to work on connotations of colour schemes that have relevance to my magazine and attracting target audiences.

Three Key Points for Development When Producing the Main Task

· Layout Of Magazines (Cover, Content and Double Page spread)

· Semitics meaning and relevance

· InDesign software