Evaluation - Question 7

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

This is my preliminary task and my main task, the school magazine's and the music magazine's front covers.

The first thing that I noticed when comparing the 2 front covers, is the difference between the lighting. In my preliminary I did use the history brush tool to only have Claire in colour so I could write my coverlines on clearly, but in my main task I used the contrast/brightness tool to make the picture more illuminated and sharp coloured.

The school magazine does not feature any fonts apart from the ones that are from the Photoshop selection because at that point I did not know about the dafont website so I had to make do with the limited selection that I had. However once I started to download fonts off of the website I could start to choose fonts that were more appropriate for my genre.

I also learnt how to use the magnetic lasso tool for my main task, as I did not know what it did in my preliminary task. I used this new knowledge to make Scarlet's head overlap the masthead (above), like they do on real magazine front covers. This gives the page a 3D effect as it looks like Scarlet is leaning out of the page.

This is my preliminary task and my main task, the school magazine's and the music magazine's contents pages.

As you can see, there is a massive difference between the quality of my preliminary contents page and my main contents page. The school contents looks very plain and bare, whilst the music contents contains many more elements/layers.

The photo on the school contents is not edited at all, there is not even a drop shadow on it, whilst the music contents has a photo in it that has been contrasted, brightened, cut out, tilted and drop shadowed.

Before I took my photos I made sure that I had already picked the location and whether I needed any props or not. I knew that for my front cover photo I definitely wanted a plain coloured background so that it would make it easier for me to add on cover lines that were clear to see, so I just took the photo against a plain white wall. I also knew that I didn't want to use any props in this photo because I didn't want to detract attention away from the cover star, who is the person that will make people want to buy the magazine.

However, I wanted my photos for my contents and double page spread to have props in them, as by now people will already know what the interview is about, so I could start to experiment with different props. I started with an obvious prop, a guitar, which could be helpful to show the readers the music that Scarlet makes. I also used a cushion emblazoned with the Union Jack so that there was a consistent house style from the front cover through to the double page spread, as I used the Union Jack as part of my front cover and I have kept the colour scheme of red, black and white through my 3 pages.

During the preliminary task I spent so much time on my front cover, I had to rush to finish my contents page, and I think you can see this in the quality differences between the 2 pages. Therefore I made sure that with the main task I kept up to date with everything and that I spent almost the same amount of time on each page, so that I had time at the end of the project to see if I had to improve on anything.