Evaluation Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Using technology in this project has many advantages and disadvantages. Using this technology within magazine production is a faster, more effective way of creating a magazine and can make the final product look a lot more interesting. More information is available on the internet and it is cheap and simple to use. Information is easily accessible and can be obtained from websites all over the world.
On the other hand, everyone can see the work you have produced, and some data may be unavailable due to some sites being blocked and software breaches. Software problems could lead to the loss of work and could make it difficult for all of the aspects of the magazine to come together. Free sites may have limitations and may be vulnerable to being taken down.

I have been using Photoshop CS5 to design the majority of my music magazine. Although I had already used Photoshop before it was good to use it again properly and discover all of the different tools. The tools I have found most useful are the ones I have highlighted in coloured boxes on this screenshot of my cover. The shape tool (highlighted in blue) was very useful when creating boxes and making the background shapes for my cover. The navigator (highlighted in purple) was useful so I could zoom in and see what I was doing in greater detail. The layer box (highlighted in red) was the most useful tool, showing me each individual aspect of my design and allowing me to move them and resize them to make it look better.

I used popular font site 'Dafont' in order to get the correct font for my magazine. There is not a large range of fonts on Photoshop so it was good to have such a large range to choose from on this website. I also used photo sharing site Flickr in order to upload my photos and annotate them so that they could be attached to my blog. I could add notes to my ideas and show existing covers with annotations to help me with my final design.


My blog itself has been very useful for documenting all of my planning and showing how I have progressed through the project. It was helpful to catagorise all of my work into the different labels to keep it organised and see work from previous students to give us ideas. During the project I was introduced to online magazine website Zinio. This website had online versions of many existing magazines which were available to flick through and preview. This was helpful because I could see what existing magazines looked like and how they targeted their audiences appropriately.


The only other two programs I used during this project were Microsoft Powerpoint and Word, which I used in my planning and preparation. Powerpoint was a useful programme for making moodboards to display my initial ideas and I used Word to write up my magazine article before putting it onto the final design.