Development of skills

How have my skills developed since the School Magazine?

Looking back at when I was doing my school magazine, I can now see how much my skills have developed. At the beginning of the year when I started doing Media Studies, I had no idea how to use Photoshop or any of the programmes we used within the media lessons.
>Having Photoshop on my home laptop, has allowed me to practise and improve my skills on the programme. I have used YouTube tutorials to help guide me through the vast, complex features of Photoshop. With these programmes I have learnt to use liquify- the slimming and bloating tool, I know how to change hair and eye colour and am now much more confident with layering, changing fonts, font colours and adding glows, strokes and embossing text. I can also use the Magic Wand tool to precisely outline images and crop them. All these techniques have been very useful in the making of my magazine.

>I am also much more confident with photography- having taken many pictures of Louise for my feature, I became more sure of all the features on the camera- for example, manual zooming with the lense, changing the picture to black and white and achieving good lighting for different types of photos.

>Making the questionnaire and getting back the results from it showed me how much easier it was to understand what exactly it was that my target audience wanted before going ahead and constructing the magazine. I feel now that I am more aware of the types of issues young teenage girls are interested in. I now know how important it was for me to organise to research and carry out an audience survey.
The talk with Art Director of Mojo, Mark Wagstaff really gave me an insight to how much work and planning goes into making a magazine. It was interesting learning about all the different jobs there are to do throughout the process and the large number of specialized people it takes to make a single issue.

Having deconstructed a large number of real music magazines, I could compare the techniques used by real magazines to the skills and techniques I used to make my own magazine. I stuck to only using three colours throughout the whole magazine and these colours were purposely chosen to appeal to my target audience, and my pictures were striking however not overwhelmed with colours and patterns. I linked the front cover information to the contents features and the main feature in the magazine so that, although this is a fictional magazine, it is still consistent and appears realistic. This lead to a more coherant, final product.

Finally, looking back at my finished magazine, I can tell that my skills in Photoshop have progressed dramatically and I am pleased with what I have been able to achieve. If I had the chance to re do the task at hand, I perhaps would have aimed to find out about a real upcoming artist as opposed to making a fictional feature. I would have also liked to have tried making a magazine which was not in my comfort zone; for example, a music magazine aimed at 20 year old men. This would have been a lot more challenging and perhaps could have tested my skills further. However, all in all, I am very pleased with what I have made as I have learnt a range of new skills which I can take with me into next year's media studies.