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

For my coursework everything was edited and created within Photoshop. Prior to the assignment i had a good thorough knowledge of photoshop since i had been using it for almost 2 years, although mostly for recreational purposes it allowed me to become familiar with the tools giving me a slight head start with the assignment since i could almost skip the 'How to use Photoshop' stage when we started making our magazines.

But this doesn't mean i didn't learn during the course of making my magazine. Although i knew what most of the tools did i never used them in this sort of situation.

After seeing just what it can do to make a magazine i can understand why it's considered the norm to use this in the magazine industry.

It's main advantage is that it's very user friendly, although it may take time to get used to it when you start you're given a blank sheet with all of your tools neatly laid out, no complicated set-ups or options. But on the other hand like i said it does take practice to remember and get used to using specific tools for all sorts of different situations.

One disadvantage is that it's easy to get confused with all the different layers. This can be made easier by grouping them but even so, when working with 30/40+ layers it becomes more of a chore trying to find the specific layer you want to work on in amongst those 40.

During my project i used the website flickr. flickr allows the user to upload images for easy view, but unlike other websites such as photobucket flickr has many neat features such as the ability to share the images with other users easily, blog them to a multitude of websites (In this case i used blogger) and add annotations for easy evaluation. flickr is a website and not a program so it could be accessed from anywhere and this made it very easy when working from home or anywhere outside college.








The other main website i used was blogger. Blogger is a simple to use and set-up blogging site, although it can be used for any sort of blog I have used it to upload my various pieces of coursework, including picture of my finished product and these very evaluations. Blogger has the ability to connect with websites such as the above mentioned flickr so i could share images across the two websites, it also saved space, instead of cluttering my blogger page with lots of large images i simply including posts with links to the flickr page so those wishing too could comment and view the annotations.

The post editing could have been better in my opinion, although i didn't do this in the end it might well have been easier to type up any long pieces of text in a word processor and copy and paste it into the edit box on blogger.

The website was also customizable, i could change background colours and themes to my own personnel tastes, although not really necessary it made the blog look a bit nicer and would certainly be useful to someone wishing to make theirs very personal.