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

Preliminary Task                                                                                                 Main Task and Final Product

By looking back at my preliminary task and my main task and comparing the two you can see a massive change in how my skills and knowledge about technology’s and magazine conventions has improved. I feel that my approach to audience research has improved as in my main task I have researched a lot more and then taken the research and actually applied it to my final products. This allowed me to create a more realistic looking magazine compared to my preliminary task

By doing lots of detailed research and planning, I feel I have gained more of an insight in to magazine conventions and understand them well. I found things from my research that showed me how I could make my magazine look more professional and realistic which I didn't include in my preliminary task. For example, I focused more on the colour scheme so that the colours all worked really well together and created a realistic look, I also put an issue number on my front cover, something else that I did not do in my preliminary task. I think I also improved my language that I used in my cover lines and plugs and my font size and type to make my magazine appear more professional. By looking at lots of magazine layouts in my main task, I feel I really improved my contents page because the design is much more interesting and looks much more realistic than in my preliminary however I did find my contents page the harder out of the 3 to make look realistic and I feel this shows in both my preliminary and my main task.

I already knew how to use paint shop pro so I don't think I have developed my skills there, but by editing my photos a lot more thoroughly and creating my masthead in here rather than just putting everything straight in to InDesign like in my preliminary, I think it made my magazine looked far more professional. I feel after improving my skills, InDesign allowed me to create a more interesting layout than in my preliminary and place text easily. I didn't know how to use InDesign when I started, so my skills have definitely developed and this shows when you compare my preliminary task to my final product.

I feel that my photos taken for my preliminary and main task have improved as I focused a lot more on the shot type and clothing on the model than I did in my preliminary. I did find that the Canon camera was great for taking photos and allowed me gain the exact shots I wanted due to being able to change so many settings. However, I did get different quality of images between the 2 tasks as I was able to use InDesign a lot better so my final front cover did not look blurry or out of focus.

I think I have also developed my evaluation skills as my final evaluation of my own main task product is much more detailed that my preliminary. In my preliminary task I didn't go in to as much detail and simply wrote 1 paragraph explaining what I did, but for my main task I did my evaluation in thorough sections using images and other media technology’s to explain my points. I think by doing this I have definitely developed my evaluation skills and my skills on the whole project altogether.