Diary entry week 10

Weekly review 05/04/2010 week 10

Now that I have all my feedback from my consumer I can start to improve my magazine from the improvements given to me from my consumers for example I change my genre of magazine to sophisticated pop which is like “Q” magazine’s genre, therefore it matches my style model better. My magazine has dramatically changed which just shows that these improvements have really made differences and have made my magazine a better quality one. After doing these improvements I think my magazine looks better and I’m glad I got my magazine critically evaluated as this has helped me create a better quality magazine. I also made my own improvements such as changing the layout of my front page in columns of artists as I think the front cover still looked too empty and I am glad I took this risk as it worked out better. Now that I have done my final product evaluations will be my next step which I will show that my improvements really made a difference to my audience’s second responses.

Final product

Diary entry week 9/feedback

Weekly review 29/03/2010 week 9

After all 3 weeks all three drafts of the 3 pages are finished I will show my magazine to my target audience of 16+ to see what they think of my magazine “REPLAY” and what could be improved. After my magazine was critically evaluated by my audience I took the feedback to see what they liked about my project at this stage and what I could improve. Many consumers liked the layout of my magazine as it was easy to read with it being set out in columns and having many focuses. Like my double page spread being almost half and half with the image and text. They also liked my front covered image as it was very striking and the Mise En Scene of the headphone linked to music perfectly, therefore demonstrating that this magazine is a music one. Another reason why they liked this picture was that it captured Ke$ha’s personality as she is wild and crazy and doesn’t care what anyone thinks so she can get away with pulling a face like this on the front cover. Also they thought other parts of my magazine related to music well as my magazine was called replay and the symbols used related to playing music. Although due to this they said I needed to improve on my Mise En Scene of my pictures for example making them have more music equipment in them. Therefore some of my pictures need retaking, for example my contents pictures, but some don’t such as my front cover picture and my double page spread picture. However to make sure my magazine is to good quality I will retake all my photos to see if I can improve the pictures any better. For example using more lighting that is unnatural to bright out every part of the image and putting more and bigger music equipment that you can see like audio boxes and record CDs as my double page spread pictures uses a CD and it is quite small and hard to see. Also another point my consumers pointed out was the colour difference in some parts which should have been the same, which was spotted very cleverly as you can tell when working on the computer until you print it out. Therefore it should have all been bright yellow, but it was greenish yellow. My music magazines genre is pop although people thought this didn’t suit the magazine, therefore I my have to be more specific and change it to sophisticated pop. Although many people liked parts of my magazine there was still room for improvements like the symbols in my magazine names were good but they could be better by putting the play symbol is the actual word play so it related more. I also had to be carefully with the text as they thought that “GLEE” was very sophisticated pop so I had to change that and the name “Puddle Pie” as it wasn’t relevant to the genre. Therefore I must apply all these improvements to my magazine pages as this will really benefit me by making my magazine more liked and sellable.

Technical guide for photoshop

Photoshop guide

Photoshop has really helped me whilst creating my magazine, I used many tools to create my 3 pages and these are the tools I used and how they helped me.

I used many tools:

· Clone stamp – this was very helpful when getting rid of photos times and dates which my camera automatically puts on the photo and perfecting models face e.g. getting rid spots and removing.

· Crop tool – if I used a picture on my magazine and it was too bit and I wanted a closer, smaller picture the crop tool was great for removing big parts of photographs

· Blur tool – when cutting out photos the outline of the image wasn’t always the sharpest and straightest, therefore by using this toll it blurred and smudged the outline making it smooth and straight.

· Magnetic lasso – when cutting shapes out of the photos I used this tool as it let me cut it out with a steady, accurate hand.

· Paint bucket tool – this tool made it very accurate when colouring in shapes as it was quick and easy, whereas if I used a paint brush it wouldn’t be as I would need a steady hand and it would take ages due to me wanting it colour in large areas.

· Horizontal type tool – I used this when writing text all over my 3 pages and I used the horizontal one as this is the normal way to type text.

· Rectangle marquee tool – this helped me select parts that were square e.g. the name of my magazine and delete multiple things

· Gradient tool – I used this tool to make my background colour more interesting rather than just the plain block colour as this blended the colour into light and dark, going from the bottom to the top of the page.

· Magic wand tool – this helped me select many different areas therefore if it was a very difficult shape this tool was ideal e.g. deleting backgrounds from photos.

· Eye dropper – this tool let me make sure all the coloured I used were the same shade as this can be difficult to tell when looking on Photoshop.

· Move tool – this tool helped me create everything I wanted to as it places everything I wanted in the right place.

· Shape tool – this created by difficult shapes I could do like my play sign and replay sign in the name of my magazine.