Main Task Final

Over the last few weeks i have been creating my final design. we were given around 3 weeks to finish it all which at the time seemed hard but after while got easier. I started off with some plans and mock ups. I showed where i was going to put some of the content and how the layout was going to be. I found that doing a plan, i was able to decide what would be good or bad in the magazine. I also asked some of my friends to comment on it and give me any advice regarding improvements. One bit of improvement in particular was to put the main picture in the middle. i applied this as shown below:

This gave the image a sense of importannce which is good for attracting readers.
I also arranged the images (mainly of the people) to show where the bit of the article about them is. I also cropped them using the cookie cutter to add more excitment. To show that the magazine isn't dull and to suit the type of magazine, i added a questionnaire featuring one of the band members and i made it so it was a bit of banta and not a dull survey.
The main issue with making this project look professional was the images i was going to use. As we wernt allowed to use any of the internet, we had to take our own or use ones that we had previously taken. I instead took pictures of 3 friends and gave them instruments and a band name etc. I had to choose my background carefully as it was a rock/indie magazine. I found a wall with a bit of graffiti and decided that would be perfect. I took one of them singly eg Ryan posing for a shot, then Stew posing with a guitar, I then took a picture of both of them together. As Dan was unavailiable for picture taking, i had to cut a previous image taken of him and add him with the other 2. I then added the cropped image to one of the pictures i took of wembley. I also edited other images so that i only got the face of the actor and added it to the black background of the magazine:






As most magazines have a bar code, i had to make one in Paint:


With the front page, i decdided to follow an NME stlye of cover, with a band member taking up one half of the page, and having some contents on the other:



For the contents page, i decided to follow the same style. I cropped out the image of Ryan leaving just the wall with graffiti on it. I enlarged it to cover the whole page and made it my background. This helps it tie in with the front page and stop viewers from getting different views of music and genre from the first 2 pages:


In this task, i found that using photoshop can be challenging and frustrating but once you get the hang of it and using all its functions, it can be pretty usuful. One problem i had to overcome was getting the images to appear in colour and not black and white. I tried to play around with the colour options but in the end i asked a technition for help which was successful. I now dont have any trouble with black and white images.
Photoshop is also good at bringing out the best in the images you edit. It allows you to edit them to what ever you want them to fit or be.
One negative thing about photoshop however is trying to get to grips with all the different uses of the prgramme. For a first time user, it didnt offer a lot of help and guidence as some of the other microsoft programmes. This posed difficulties in the beggigning.

I feel that this was a better improvement than last years work i done:
New:




Old: