Looking back at your preliminary task (the college magazine task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

The picture above is a comparison of my preliminary task (Left) and my main task (Right).

I feel the progression i made from the college magazine to the music magazine was very great.

After doing the college magazine i realised that research would be key to making a good magazine, gathering idea's and different formats of the basic conventions would help me create my own magazine that follows these conventions properly and looked good as well.

For the research i looked at a few magazines, 2 i specifically looked at were 'Classic Rock' and 'Bass Guitar Magazine'. I felt these pretty much covered the style i was looking for.

Obviously for the music magazine my audience would be different, i was aiming for rock fans between about 16 and 40+, i used magazines like classic rock who have a similar target audience to refer to when making decisions, like should i include slang words or swearing.

This sort of research helped me greatly as i had a solid idea of what to put in my magazine for the target audience, when before i had to take a blind stab at what would be mildly interesting to the majority of students.

This is somewhat different to the approach I had taken when making my College Magazine, with the Music one I had references in other magazines to look at and gain ideas, but with the College one It was based purely of ideas in my head, meaning it was of a much lesser standard when compared to my music magazine.

Such things can be seen quite clearly, such as the layout on the contents page. Since I had a physical magazine to give me guidance and ideas it's much neater, my increased knowledge of photoshop allowed me to achieve this whereas the college magazine is less neat and wasn't put together with any sort of guide.

Also to make the magazine look much more professional i had to learn to use the tools provided in photoshop to a greater degree than previously. As you can see on the college magazine front cover, the hair or the cover model and headstock of his bass guitar are somewhat badly cut out in photoshop, i further learnt to use the tools to pull off a much more professional edit with my music magazine as you can clearly see.

When creating the contents page and DPS i learnt how to use the rulers in photoshop, obviously to make it look professional the spacing or gutters between columns of text had to be neat and equal, by using the rulers i was able to easily create these gutters when moving the text around, the same goes with aligning some of the larger objects such as the title of the article and various sidebars.