Frankie's Preliminary to Final Production

My skills have progressed dramatically from when I created a school magazine in January. Since then I have become more aware of the work needed to make a magazine look professional and the planning which needs to go into the project in order for it to be successful.


To take the photographs I used a Nikon D3000 which instantly produced better looking photographs. I chose areas which I felt would represent the music genre my magazine was for. I looked online at photo shoots bands had been on and photographs used in interview pages in music magazines. Once I had a rough idea of the photo shoot I wanted to stage I was able to expand on the idea when I was actually at the shoot.

My photography skills have improved greatly during this project and I have learnt that taking the time to stage the photographs allowed me to improve my overall presentation for my magazine and helped me to get the best results I was capable of getting. Editing the photographs with the skills from photography that I already had was an advantage and I was able to expand on these skills further when it came to learning how to erase certain areas of the photograph in detail so that the image was of the best quality, whereas in my preliminary work I only used a simple programme called Picasa in order to change the brightness and shadows which didn't really show any obvious use of editing tools in the end result.
I used Jasc Paint Shop Pro X2 to edit my photographs for my magazine when I began my final production as the range of tools available was more varied and enabled me to edit my photographs in both complicated and simple ways to make my work stand out and show the effort I put into making my photographs look the best they could.


I used Macromedia Fireworks for designing the layout of my magazine as it provided lots of tools which were simple to use and allowed me to create a number of different layers which I could later edit separately before merging them to finally piece my magazine together. I used the Fireworks software to also complete the text which was going to be used on each page of my magazine and to then add effects which would make it look more professional. The simplicity of the tools enabled me to easily create shapes and lines in which I could write in or to section my work in order for it to be easily read by the reader.

The graphic design of my preliminary work was all done on Microsoft word and using the Paint accessory which limited my quality of work greatly as the programmes didn't contain many tools in which I could edit my work with which resulted in my school magazine looking unprofessional.

To write the journalism for my magazine I decided it would be a good idea to read some music magazines to find out how they spoke to artists in interviews and if they was formal or informal with their questions. After I had enough data to referr back to when I wrote the journalism for my double spread page I decided to also include to the personality of the model I used for the double spread page as I know them well and could incorporate my own ideas into the writing using my knowledge of what people my age and I would be interested in reading about which then allowed me to create the text for my double page.


For most of my work I had to use powerpoints to summarise the writing on my blog and to show the progress I had made whilst making the magazine. To then put these on my blog I had to use a website which I had never used before called 'SlideShare' which I uploaded my Powerpoints on to and then gained a HTML which allowed me to publish it onto my blog for people to view.