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

Throughout the two tasks I have progress a lot and I realised there’s more than what you expect that goes into a magazine whereas the preliminary task was how I expected it to be.  At the start of the course I believed that the preliminary task and the main task was quite easy however I was wrong, the preliminary task was okay and most of the aspects was already chosen for you. As we done a sixth form magazine for Ryde academy my audience was already selected for me because if it’s a sixth form magazine for students at Ryde academy then that’s who my target audience was whereas the music magazine was different. For the music magazine I had to choose many different things like my target audience, what kind of person would be looking at my magazine, age group and even price of the magazine.  These are all ideas I didn’t look into when I first fought into creating a music magazine.  The audience is the key element for selling any type of magazine however for a music magazine you need to make it look professional and it to have a unique selling point (USP) which is what I had to think of to do this is created a questionnaire for my target audience and I got good feedback in which I implied it to my magazine. I had to make my magazine eye-catching enough to make sure people would actually buy the magazine whereas in the preliminary task I didn’t need to do this.  I made my magazine eye-catching by using a good colour scheme and the use of the pictures on the page really help to sell the magazine. Also the slogan and masthead put it right up there with the good selling magazine because it like professional and it sounds like a music magazine. 

When I started my preliminary task I didn’t even know how to use programs like Photoshop or even the blogger. First of all I felt that I wouldn’t be able to use this site because it looked hard to use but now looking back on it I had nothing to worry about because it is really to use. Photoshop was really complicated at the start and for my preliminary task I could only use the basic tools but towards the end of creating my music magazine I can now use most of the tools on Photoshop well and efficiently.  My knowledge and understanding of these programs have improved dramatically since the start of my preliminary task and now I wouldn’t make a music magazine without using Photoshop.  Looking back into my main task which was to create a music magazine front cover, double page spread and the contents page I would have done things differently. For example on the front cover I would have made the price and issue number smaller so it was that big on the page because I fear that the prize may distract the audience from buying the magazine even though my research says otherwise. I would have changed my contents page slightly, rather than having the win festival tickets on this page I would have like to have done that on a different page like the double page spread and instead of that I would have liked to have done an editor’s Colum. Finally on the double page spread I would have made the interview text smaller, and made the interview a a lot bigger for example I would have wanted more questions about the band and how they‘re becoming bigger and how they made it.  Lastly I learnt that the people and band members that would be on the front cover need to be directly looking at the camera to give the audience an instant relationship and to have more visual impact with them.