Originally, I struggled for ideas in the preliminary task, I had gone through a number of ideas based on my ability with Photoshop, I decided something basic without much colour may be easier for me to design and create. However when put into practice this was not the case, and so I decided to scrap my progress and start again. Although my designing of an album cover went well in my opinion, I constantly found trouble in designing a college magazine, perhaps I am more familiar with album art and so it was easier for me. My final design was to do something that perhaps college students could relate to, so I used a plain A4 page, then measured out some lines, to create a lined A4 page, much like ones students would use. My plan was to make it in the style of a scrapbook, with sticky notes and taped photos. Once again, due to my lack of ability with Photoshop, the image in my head did not transfer to a Photoshop image very well.
My Music Magazine
As I mentioned earlier, perhaps one of the reasons that I had been able to create an album design much easier than I had been able to create a college magazine was that I was more familiar with it. I think this could be one of the reasons that my music magazine was a significant improvement over my original magazine. It is fair to say that my skill with Photoshop between the two had improved substantially also, due to another one of my college subjects being Games Development, we had to learn to use Photoshop quite quickly in order to show our ideas well. I have also learnt a lot about placement regarding magazines, masthead, coverlines and photos all must be in suitable areas to create a professional looking magazine.
Tools and Techniques
During the production of both of my magazines, I learnt a number of useful techniques for use in Photoshop, one of these, designed particularly for use on faces was the spot-healing tool. I had used this on some of the models in my music magazine, it essentially is a click and drag which copies over the look of the skin next to a spot on top of the spot (or whatever needs to be "cleaned").
The use of layers in Photoshop helped my in creating my final piece also, it allows for easy manipulation, moving images in front or behind each other, as well as editing whole layers without editing the whole image. I had used the drop shadow more than any other of the layer properties, it was an easy way of emphasising certain words or sentences.
Another useful tool was the magic wand, which allows for selection of areas that use a certain shade of colour (or similar depending on tolerance). This enabled me to cut people or backgrounds out from images. I was able to fill in the glimmer in my band's eyes from the flash of the camera using this tool, little tweaks such as this added up in making my magazine what it is today.
Photoshop's ruler feature also helped in the alignment and placing of my images, text and other content. While the rulers actually measure how wide the page is, it also allows you to pull off blue guidelines to place around the page, the most useful thing about this, is that images and other content will snap to these lines, creating easy placement guidelines.
Audience Appeal
I believe that using a constant scheme of dark colours, sharp fonts and relative stories (including that featured on the double page spread) helps in general to appeal to my target audience. Including a main feature of an upcoming band's world tour would appeal to my target audience as they are actively looking for new music that they would like, the fact that the band is shown as not being too well known means that it is unlikely they have heard of the band. The posture and clothing that the band wear throughout the images in the magazine should appeal to my target audience also, they should be seeing themselves as acting the same way within reason and wearing similar clothes.
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