Question 6 - What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

While producing my media product I learnt a lot about the various technologies used during the design and production process of magazines. From the initial ideas I had to the development and final production stage I have learnt skills that I didn’t have before and I’m sure will help my with my future design situations.

Blogger

Blogger has been a huge part of my project overall, as it is where all my work is displayed, including media theory, research and the main task. I had some previous experience of using Blogger from other projects I had done before, but there were various different elements I used this time. To make my work look presentable and as interesting as possible I chose from various templates to use on my media blog. I had not done this before and it helped in making my work look less wordy and more presentable.

This is what the screen looked like when I was selecting which background and template I was going to use for my blog.
I eventually decided to use this design of autumn leaves in the background for my blog:

Labels were also used on my blog to make it easier for the user to find particular sections of my work. My work was divided into five sections; Research, Media Theory, Preliminary, Target Audience and Main Task. I labelled each piece of work when had finished it, and the labels are on the right hand side of the blog for the user to select when they want to view a section.

I also had to upload images to my blog to display the various sections of my magazines I had completed so far. I had done this before in other projects, so I had no problem with it at all.

Corel Draw
Corel Draw is the programme I used to put my front cover, contents page and double page spread together. This programme was suitable because the layout of a page can be changed easily, image manipulation is straight forward and there is a wide range of font styles to choose from. Starting on a blank document it was easy to import images to edit and arrange in a way that was suitable for my magazine.

An advantage of using Corel Draw was how easy it was to move, resize and change the order of images. I rotated images to the right angles, edited the brightness and contrast of many of them and changed the order of some so they could be behind text or partly hidden by another image.

Corel Draw is also very useful for finding a variety of font styles to use for different sections of the magazine. I was able to look through all the fonts before I found the ones suitable. I found a bold font style that was perfect for the masthead on the front cover and another font that I chose to use for the article and other parts of the magazine including the interview and headings on the front cover.

The only limitation I found with using Corel Draw as opposed to Photoshop was that it was slightly more difficult to crop images accurately – I would often have to re-crop to make sure I got the section of the image that I wanted. Other than that, Corel Draw was easy to use and allowed me to create my media products successfully and to a high standard.

For the images I used in my magazine, I used an Olympus digital camera. The camera I used wasn’t heavily professional, but allowed me to take high quality pictures in various different styles. The amount I could zoom in to take a picture was high, without decreasing the picture quality. I had used this camera before and was therefore used to how it worked and what I could do in different situations e.g. taking pictures at night. The pictures came out really well and I edited brightness/contrast and saturation using Windows Photo Gallery and http://www.picnik.com/.

Using these programmes allowed me to develop my image manipulation skills in order to create images that created the best possible effect for my media product. Even small changes to an image made a big difference when laid out on a page.I also had a chance to use the ‘’Polaroid Effect’’ option on the Picnik website. This allowed me to angle the image and lay it onto a white background to create a scrapbook look. I also added text underneath the images, pulling out quotes from the interview.

Internet research was also a major part during the construction of my media product. I used the internet to research other magazines, in order to find out more about how they were designed, who distributes them and what the best way is to attract my preferred target audience. I feel my research has definitely paid off, as I have analysed magazines to gain a more thorough understanding of the magazine design process and the media production world in general.