Above is my preliminary work with my final work alongside it, when I compare them both I can see a great change as my ability to use Photoshop has grown and my knowledge has made me wiser.My preliminary demonstrates this as it was all very bland, untidy and dull whereas my final front cover is sophisticated and eye catching. By comparing the two you can see my ability has maximized greatly as my capability of Photoshop has grown. My preliminary demonstrates this as it was all very bland, untidy and dull whereas my final front cover is sophisticated and eye catching. As you can see, I learnt a lot about the layout of magazines and what conventionally goes where and why e.g. the barcode normally goes in the bottom corner. When you compare the both you can see the difference in colour scheme as when I analysed other music magazines I noticed they tend to use contrasting colours to make the magazine stand out, whereas for my preliminary I used to different shades of blue, which didn’t work as well because it looks plain and unattractive. Also, I realised that font is vital because it needs to be clear and easily visible for the audience to read, therefore I decided to use strong contrasting colours e.g. white font on a black background and black writing on a red background, my reasons for doing this is too make the whole page eye catching but also emphasises the writing, making it clearly visible to the reader. But on the other hand my preliminary task used all white writing, which would not attract the readers as there’s no contrast and the front page writing just looks like long paragraphs of writing which may put the reader of as this is very unconventional and as my questionnaire results prove many prefer to look at picture rather than huge paragraphs of text.
My preliminary contents is very unalike my final contents, as it is plain, repetitive and very unconventional as when I research contents pages I realised they are normally very busy, fun and informative. Therefore my final contents uses the conventions well, as it highlights the main stories, gives the reader a good indication of what’s inside and looks fun but informative, these are all very important conventions of a contents page as a contents page is used to inform the reader. Likewise to my front cover I used my house colours for the contents page, I did this on both preliminary and my final, however I feel I used my colour scheme to its full potential on my final contents page, as it all blends in very well, grabs people’s attention and looks sophisticated. Finally the text is all very readable as the majority of it is in black, the whole way through my magazine I used Ariel or Ariel black to keep my magazine looking stylish rather than too busy or over the top as it would look like a kid’s magazine. Also sticking to the same fonts and house colours lets the audience establish what magazine it is easily.
Overall, in the process of making my three final products, I have learnt many things, from how to use my camera to its full advantage to take a good photo to how to manipulate images via Photoshop. You can clearly see this in my preliminary pieces and my final pieces as the image on my preliminary front cover is all distorted and placed very badly, however the image on my front cover has been edited in such a clever way it blends in with the white of my text, contrasts with the background and also highlights the effect I was aiming to convey, a good girl gone bad. Also, on my final contents page I took a variety of different pictures, in different lighting e.g. a spotlight and natural sunlight, so that my pictures would vary in poses, dimension and effect as I wanted to convey a mixed genre therefore I took different pictures using different mis-en-scene to highlight the different genres. However for my preliminary task I took two photos for my contents page, they were both shot outside so they both have similar lighting and give of a similar effect, they are both also long shots which is very boring for a reader. Therefore for my final contents page I took a whole body image, a close up and also a medium shot as this added variety to all the pictures along with my models different facial expressions as their different facial expressions match the story e.g. Justin’s summer time secret’s and my model is placing his finger against his lips as though his hiding a secret or telling the audience to be quiet about something, this will raise curiosity as to what he wants them to be quiet about therefore many readers will read that article.
