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

What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of

constructing the product?

In order to create my final product I had to do several planning stages. First of all I had to carry out the school magazine which was the preliminary task to the music magazine. This involved taking a quick photo shoot of an idea we had for a school magazine on whatever subject we thought relevant and then editing and creating a final product on Photoshop. This initial stage of the product let me get a feel for how camera angles and camera effects would impact the pictures you took and how to use your photography efficiently. The use of Photoshop let me get a taste for how it works and how to mess around with it in order to create something different with the pictures available to you.

Once the school magazine was done, the next focus was to get initial ideas and background information into the music genre that I wanted to focus in my music magazine. This meant that I had to create a mood board, questionnaire and find out background research of my own into the genre. We see that each helped in the preparing a visual image of the music magazine, we see that the music board was a visual guide to the music genre we wanted to represent, where artists and the music genre were represented through pictures giving a visual image of what the music genre represents so that it is easier to create a music magazine that represents it more efficiently.

The questionnaire was a fundamental part to the research and planning because it was a target audience based questionnaire. This meant that the question s asked in the questionnaire meant that it would be what the target audience I was aiming to attract would want to see and what they thought would be best to be in a magazine directed at them. With this in mind I referred the questions in the questionnaire, to my own music magazine and made what I had in the magazine relevant to what was asked in the questionnaire making it appeal more to its target audience as they would see that we were taking them into account when creating a music magazine.

The background research and information into the music genre was in order to make the music magazine as accurate as possible to what an actual magazine of that genre would look like. It would also help in setting out special features specific for the music magazine that could not be done without the background research there, for example font, colour schemes and even layout. These sort of factors are all key in creating a music magazine and without having done the research there won’t be a chance of creating a music magazine that is unique to yourself but also follows certain guidelines to outline its music genre. The research and information also allowed me to pick up on the hottest tracks, albums and artists, that I could reference to in my music magazine. These sort of features would attract fans of the music genre because it would contain information that they would find interesting like the latest gossip in the business as well as the latest and hottest tracks that are available in the business.

Once this research was carried out, I had to carry out annotations of 4 front covers, contents pages and double page spreads. This was for the purpose of getting ideas of what a front cover, contents page and double page spread would look like as a final version ready for print. It would also provide me with key features of how each of these pages would be set out and what makes each one a certain area of a music magazine. Once this was done I was able to implement these features into my own magazine like the masthead, sell lines, buttons, quotes, etc. and it was able to make my magazine my own and still have key features of that of the music genre that would be able to attract readers in order to sell to them. It was also a good idea to look at these different front covers, content pages and double page spreads because it was a good way to see what professional music magazines included in their magazines as their articles. This allowed me to design my front cover, contents page and double page spread in a manner that would attract its readers through specifically focusing on that music genre to appeal to its target audience as well as trying to appeal to a more wide, diverse target audience.

When using the camera, I learnt that you had to have a picture of more or less what you wanted to shoot before you did it. This was so that you were working along a guide and structure that would lead to the end product of my music magazine. There was also the fact of thinking of camera angles, lighting and effects, camera angles were useful when you wanted to focus on the landscape of the situation that you wanted to capture through the fact that the camera angle was what determined the outcome of the landscape you were going to use for in your pictures. Lighting was important because it was able to be used to represent sentiment and emotions, as a play with the lighting would represent different emotions and feelings, for example a white flash picture could represent a more calm, inclusive ambient whereas a darker image could represent a darker, more serious look on the image. So as we see lighting can play on how we see an image overall and how our emotions and thoughts are impacted because of it. The effects of the camera has an outcome on the image itself, and how you wanted the image to portray what you were looking to achieve. With the right settings you can get a picture that seems faded out or even one that focuses in on the image, these either make the image look like you want to find out more about what the picture or magazine is offering, or even that it gives extra focus on the image because it is an exclusive found only in that magazine alone leading more readers to purchase the magazine in the long run.

Through the production of the magazine the websites I used included Prezi, Slideshare, Voicethread, YouTube, TuneIn, Wikipedia, Powtoon, Facebook & profile websites. Websites like Prezi, Slideshare, Voicethread Wikipedia and Powtoon (one instance YouTube), were used to present work in several different formats of presentations, each with their own unique style and flare individually being able to bring something along to the table to make the overall project a unique and a good manner of evaluating work effectively through being able to compare one’s work through different mediums and being able to evaluate it as critically as possible from a neutral perspective. I then used websites like Wikipedia, YouTube, TuneIn, Facebook and profile websites were used for the purpose of carrying out information and research that needed to be done for the creation of the music magazine, for example looking into the history of the genre, looking at the music related to the genre or even looking into character profiles of artists in the music and see what they represent as well as what they’re music represents as a whole on top of what other information you can gather on them that could benefit the production of the music magazine that you are creating. All these websites preformed and contributed in their own manner to the creation and finalization of the music magazine and project as a whole being able to bring in and explore different skills and ideas, through developing those that the designer has already.

In order to carry out the project I had to use programs like Photoshop, Microsoft word and Microsoft PowerPoint. Photoshop allowed me to work with the pictures that I had taken and convert them into a music magazine of my choice, where through patience of editing and re-adjustment I was able to come up with a final piece for my music magazine that had a front cover, contents page and a double page spread. This meant that I was able to design the music magazine in whatever creative manner I decided with efficiency and precision in the editing itself, minimising the overall disadvantage of being rather new to using software like Photoshop. Microsoft Word and PowerPoint allowed me to work with the information and work that I was undergoing that was not going directly up on to Wikispaces, rather most of the work from this point would be exchanged into jpegs that would be a more suitable form of presenting work on the Wikispaces than a document itself., e.g. Annotations and Questionnaires.

All these different applications, software's and websites have been very new to me but each possessed something that gave the overall project a uniqueness about it and turned it into my own. This meant evaluation, the research and the carrying out of the project was done in as efficient manner as thought possible so that I could critically assess my own work and standards and how well I thought I worked alongside my own abilities.