Looking back on your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

On reflection looking back at my preliminary task, I feel as if though my design concept was absolutely Ludacris. My image was stretched and I generally think it does not look like a school magazine

First of all, I had no use of the four FS frame, format, formula, function. It was very poorly structured and my cover lines were at the bottom of the page. I have definitely learnt from my mistakes as I used cover lines in my final product.

I think one of the most beneficial things was the research, researching existing magazines to give you a sense of design. It challenged your creativity and essentially how you viewed magazines as an audience. Looking at my final piece I can see I have knowledge of conventions. I could not see my prelim on the shelf's at all! The colour is too bold with the white font which is too large and It doesn't work. When designing my music magazine, I had to consider so much; e.g. name, model, colour scheme, house style etc. I have learnt that when magazine designing, it isn't just handed to you, its not easy at all. You have to edit and re edit drafts over hours to get the correct eye of the magazine. I admire the designers for magazine as I feel it takes a lot of determination, creativity, and an eye for art and of course good marketing skills; That's another major thing I have learnt. In order to attract your target audience, you have to thing of marketing strategies that will engage the reader to buy the magazine e.g. Freebies etc. It was really interesting learning about different theories e.g. The hypodermic needle and how it can be applied to your media product. This had to make me think about how my double page spread could be applied to this e.g. in terms of entertainment. I stuck to using publisher while designing my final piece because I felt comfortable with it since I have been using throughout my school years. I did struggle on where I would put my sell line, cover lines, whether to have a banner etc, because it was tight on fitting everything in, I thought this would be a problem for my double page spread, however I found away around this and I didn't know but you can adjust the page width(in cm) which helped me a lot! I learnt a lot about publisher from the fonts to design format. I used existing and new programmes such as slide share, Prezi, Youtube, Windows movie maker and PowerPoint.  One of the most interesting things was making my video for my evaluation, I learnt all the tricks of editing and producing a clip.

I feel as if though doing the prelim task was one of the most important tasks there is to be done, as you can then compare your final product after. I have learned so much in design concept, media institutions e.g Bauer, use of technology, marketing and audience pleasures, theories, and finally blogger!