Evaluation Activity 7

Evaluation Activity 7

• 1.
  Looking Back AtYour Preliminary Task, What Do You Feel You Have Learnt in the Progression From It to the Full Product?
• 2.
   My preliminary magazine was centred on students at school but I don’t think the conventions I used portrayed this clearly as they were only basic; my Photoshop skills were limited when using the software for the first time.
• 3.
   However, now I feel that I have learnt to develop my skills using different technologies and software, especially in Photoshop, to create a magazine with conventions appropriate for a specific target audience and genre.
• 4.
   I have taken into account the importance of mise-en-scene when taking photographs for my final product by making sure that the mise-en-scene fits in well with the R&B/hip-hop genre of my magazine. This is shown clearly through the model’s trendy costume as most of the items he is wearing are designer wear, connoting his wealth and class, which is a characteristic that hip-hop/R&B artists like to flaunt. Whereas, the mise-en-scene of my preliminary magazine doesn’t clearly highlight that it’s meant to be a school magazine. In addition to this, the colour scheme and the layout don’t help to make it look like a school magazine either. The colour scheme used is quite feminine so doesn’t target male students, and the layout and the models’ costumes are quite random and irrelevant to the target audience as well.
• 5.
   But afterdoing a lot of research into other magazines and producing my final product, I have realised that I have just used a two-palette colour scheme (not including the colours of the models’ clothing) for my preliminary magazine and that a two-palette colour scheme was not vibrant enough to attract consumers’ attention. Whilst analysing other magazines I found that most of them use a three or four colour palette, so I acted on this knowledge and decided to have a four- palette colour scheme that consists of black, purple, gold, and white.  Moreover, researching into the rule of thirds has allowed me to follow the convention of forming a structured layout within my magazine, particularly for my front cover. There is a vast difference between the front cover I produced for my final product and the preliminary magazine, as the front cover of my preliminary magazine doesn’t really have a neat layout - the positioning of the cover lines look messy.
• 6.
   Exploring different font styles (on http://www.dafont.com/) has been able to help me select a good variety of unique font styles to use within my final product too, as the font styles I used for my preliminary magazine are too plain.  Throughout this project I also improved my editing techniques whilst designing the final product. I figured out how to: cut out images smoothly, get rid of flash reflections off glasses, and alter the brightness/contrast, hue/saturation, etc, appropriately. This allowed me to achieve a proficient finish on the images, as well as making editing easier by taking the photographs of my model against a light- coloured background, compared to the rough finish on the images used for the preliminary magazine.