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

While I have been producing my music magazine I have learnt a lot about many different programmes on the computers and the technology involved during the design process of my magazine. From the initial plans that were produced very basically to the most advanced ICT skills that needed to be used to get to the final production stage. Due to this process I have managed to pick a lot of skills in programmes that I may never of necessarily used had I not gone through this whole process. 

One of the main things that I have used for my overall Media Studies project is Blogger.com.

Blogger is my online blog that has been used to display all of my work that I have produced during this process of constructing my media product. I had never had any previous experience of Blogger before so every feature that I have used in my project has been new to me.

Design: The first task I had, was to choose a design for my blog, I decided to go for a design that was very simple and easy to read and a design where every feature was there and easy to navigate between.

Labels: I used labels on my blog to make it easier for the viewer of my blog to navigate through each section of the project that I have included on the blog. The labels that I used were: “Main Task”, “Planning”, “Preliminary Task”. “Research”, “Target Audience” and “Evaluation”. Every time I uploaded a new post onto my blog, I would select a label, or labels, for my work to go in to. The labels are able to view on the right hand side of my blog for the user to select which section they want to look at when and if they need to.

Pictures: Another thing that I had to do was to upload image files to my blog, I had never done this before but it wasn’t a struggle for me as it was very easy to use.

For the actual design process of my media product I had to use a specialist design programme. I decided upon using Corel Draw, as it seemed to have many features on there that seemed easy to use and yet seemed very professional.

Although I had never used Corel Draw before I very quickly became used to the programme and I knew what I was doing. I used this programme to produce all three products of my music magazine; my front cover, my double page spread and my contents. This programme was very easy to use and was suitable for what I had intended to do, change things around when they I thought that they were not in the correct position, it was also very easy to import, resize, re-position and change the order of images into the Corel Draw document.

The only downside to this programme that I found was that I seemed very hard to crop images to the size that was correct for my magazine, after searching for how to do it and ultimately failing, I decided to use a different programme in Adobe Photoshop Elements as I was already experienced in using this programme and knew how to crop images quickly and easily.

As I say, this was the only downside to Corel Draw.

The images that I used in my magazine were taken on my camera phone; the phone has a 12 megapixel camera so I ensured that the quality was that of a high one. Another feature of this camera was that it allowed me to be able to zoom in quite a lot to take a picture without it actually decreasing the quality of the picture being taken. I had used this camera before so I found it very easy to use as I had experience in using it. The picture that I used for my double page spread originally was very bright, I was able to decrease the brightness of this photo by editing it on a programme called Photo Tricks on my Apple iMac.

 

I also used the Internet quite a lot, the only reason that I used this was to be able to do research on different types of magazine and find out every bit of information that I needed. I feel that my research defiantly paid off as I feel that due to my analysing of other magazine, my media products have included styles and features that established magazines also include.