Draft Evaluation Question 7

Looking back at your preliminary task (the school magazine task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

While completing my preliminary I was very much a novice in terms of technology. I think that the preliminary is a reflection of my inexperience of technical software. I have developed my skills over the process of creating my magazine and I feel that developing these skills has been one of the most important process of the whole course. Without developing my skills through practise I would have been left with a final product I could have been capable of doing better.

Through using Photoshop I have developed the necessary skills needed so that I can produce a product of the highest of standards and ability. You can clearly see that my skills were pretty much non existent, I had no idea what I was really doing, you can tell that I haven't had experience with Photoshop previously and my preliminary is basic as it can be. I've learned so much by using Photoshop and playing around with it, a few things I've leaned are, how to put together a good magazine, which includes how to move and position images and texts, create new text boxes and create new layers and position them where they need to be. I have also learned how to edit the font of my text and the colour and size to how I want it. I've also learned how to edit photos and to select, copy and paste them to where I want them.

I believe that throughout the process my knowledge of how magazine are made and the complexity and hard work that goes into creating a magazine is now understood. As I said I think that without developing my skills in terms of using technology I would have a very inadequate final product. Using Photoshop for the first time proved to me how much I didn't know about the technology but looking back at my preliminary and comparing it to my finish product I can clearly see how far I have come.

The preliminary task was done over a short period of time so that means that there wasn't any room to experiment with tools within Photoshop which again means that I was limited as I had no chance to use the trial and error way of learning. I think that from the preliminary task, to the draft and with the finished piece the improvements of my skills are obvious. I have learned so much from the preliminary and not just in terms of skills using technology. I think that this is the most important thing I have learned during this process is how to see where gaps in the magazine making industry lie and how to fill those gaps. While creating my Preliminary magazine I had no idea on who my target market would be, who would be the distributor and how it would link with a particular social group. I learned how every aspect of a magazine has to link together and I've learned a lot about how the industry goes about producing successful magazines.