Skills development cover

Skills development cover

• 1.
  Skills Development- Front Cover
• 2.
  Strengths and weaknesses Ithink I succeeded in creating a cover which follows most of the codes and conventions of a professional music magazine. For example I used a masthead in a font which relates to the genre of the magazine and my cover lines contain bands which my target audience like. Another strength would be the design of the cover, as it was designed by me and turned out better than the first sketch because I found out what looked better on the screen after trying out different fonts and positions. I managed to use Photoshop with minimal help from the teacher and ended up with an outcome that looks relatively professional. I think my weakness for the production of this cover was time management as I struggled to complete the cover in a short space of time.
• 3.
  What did Ifind easy and what did I find difficult? I found that most of the processes were easy because they were repetitive.Adding text boxes for example was not difficult so I just had to find the fonts I needed and change the colours when necessary.This was also an easy task. Moving the different elements of the magazine was time consuming because you had to search through the different layers until you found what you were looking for. The most difficult element of this production was making the masthead look like it disappears behind the cover star.This was a new technique for me and required a lot of concentration in order to make it disappear in the right places. Apart from that, there was nothing that really challenged me.
• 4.
  Main tools The maintools I used were the text tool to create all of the cover lines. I used the text tool to create all of my own fonts so I didn’t have to copy them off another piece of work. I then had to change the colours of them so the colour chart was something I used often as well. Another main tool was the shape tool which allows you to draw shapes and use them on your product. I used the rectangle stamp tool the most for things like the skylines and the small rectangles above each cover line.
• 5.
  How does myuse of Photoshop compare to the preliminary task I produced? Since the preliminary task, I have become more confident with Photoshop because the repetition of the processes made me better. I understood the conventions better and therefore knew how to structure my front cover better to suit an audience. For example, I used a destroyed looking font for my mast head which fits the indie vibe and I was able to import this font from a website which I wouldn’t have known how to do during the preliminary task. I learnt how to add a barcode and change the scale of the image to better fit the magazine. The cover lines on my music magazine fill up the spaces around the subject better then they did on my college magazine.The colour scheme I used is also better fitting and it is more refined.