Evaluation Question 6

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

Whilst I was creating this product I learned a lot of information on many designing websites such as Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Fireworks and Cinema 4D. I learned a lot of information on Photoshop when going through the process to create my magazine. Microsoft Word seeing as I am very familiar with this program as I use it for most of my work. However, I soon found whilst trying to design my draft that there are many limitations to using this program such as you can't edit photos very well on it and that things overall aren't very easy to move around and position etc. I therefore downloaded the trial of Photoshop. This benefited me very well as I could go into further editing to make my magazine more visually interesting as a product. For example my artist images appear to have a white background. To do this I selected round the artist in the image carefully then secondly inversed the select to the background, after doing that I turned the background white with the brush tool or I even deleted the background completely. Doing this means I can then use the image on any background as there will be no elements of distraction in the image and no existing background to the image will be shown.

As you can see on my from my first prelim task front cover to my music magazine front cover I have improved a lot on visual interest. On my prelim task I used Microsoft word on all of this and didn’t have access to Photoshop. However on my music magazine I did have access. This therefore improved my editing skills and I could go into further skill and techniques to improve my magazine covers. For example the text is alot harder to see on my prelim magazine front cover as the background is busy and full of different shades of colour. However on my music magazine front cover i have removed the background around the main image so the text is 100% visible with no elements of distraction. I also learnt about pixelating images and making them fit perfectly on the page so that it didn't stretch the pixels. This was some of the main feedback I got on all my pieces about how the images seemed pixelated. This was because I had set the dimensions for the Photoshop page too big compared to the photo dimensions I was trying to put on there. This was something I never knew about before so this will probably come in handy in the future to know.