Evaluation - Question 6

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

Throughout the entire creative process I have used a variety of different programs, software and tools to put together all the elements of my magazine.

The main piece of software that I used to create my magazine was Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Before I started this course, I had no previous knowledge of Photoshop and had never used it before in my life. However, through watching various tutorials on the internet and practising during the preliminary task, I slowly began to gain more skills and knew how to use the tools in the program properly.

A few of the things that I have learnt whilst designing Frett magazine in Adobe Photoshop:

- How to drop shadow text and images.

This allowed me to create the magazine's masthead, shadow text to make it jump off of the page and shadow my photos on the double page spread.

- How to make and use layers.

This enabled me to move different elements around the page, label these elements and know how to use different tools on these layers.

- How to use the magnetic lasso tool.

This tool was extremely useful to me as it made me able to take a photo, and cut out a specific part of it, then copy and paste that part as a different layer so I could get rid of the waste parts of the photo. This made it much easier and faster than having to manually erase around the part of the image that I wanted.

Another application that I have used in this project is Blogger.com.

I have obviously used this website to record every part of my project. I can use it to post all of the stages of the magazine, the planning, design and final product. Blogger.com is a useful format to post on as it enables me to post images and links to other websites as well as just writing, which makes it a more interesting and interactive format to use.

A few of the things that I have learnt whilst using Blogger.com:

- How to post links and images onto my blog.

- How to label my posts according to what they contain, which makes it easier for other people to find what they are looking for on my blog.

I also used a website called dafont.com, which is a website that allows me to download fonts onto the computer for me to use in Photoshop.

On this site I could search through hundreds of different fonts to find the ones that were appropriate to my music genre.