Jamie's From Preliminary to Final

My skills have improved a lot since making the school magazine in January. I have now realised what is needed in a magazine to make it look a lot more professional and the amount of planning that has to go into it to make it a successful magazine.

The structuring of the photography has improved dramatically since January as we are now aware that if we stage the photos, we can have the photos how we want so if we wanted to add text over a photo, we would move the person in the photo to the side giving enough room for text. In January we edited our photos with Picasa for simple shading and to change the brightness, but for our final production we used Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Photoshop as the range of editing tools is more vast than Picasa so we could make the photos look more professional.

I have used Macromedia Fireworks for designing the layout and structure of my magazine as I have much experience using this software in my Graphic Design lessons. This software was useful as it is very simple to use and can give a very professional finish. I also used Fireworks to create the text for my magazine as you can also add effects and edit the text very easily to make it look attractive.

In my preliminary, I used Microsoft Word to create the structure and layout of the magazine; this did not give as good a quality finish to our magazine as this software is meant to be used for text. Also this software did not have many editing tools to use.

The journalism on my preliminary production was very simple and not very detailed; therefore when it came to writing the journalism for my final production, I researched different music magazines and made a radial analysis to study the text in other music magazines. I found that if I’m writing an interview, it is best to use informal and friendly language. My research into the radial analysis I included into my work along with my own ideas as I know what my peers and I would be interested in reading.