During the process of constructing and creating my final product and its three pages, I learned a great deal about different technologies and different techniques and tools I can use to achieve a professional-looking final result. For the construction of our product, we used two main pieces of software: Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Adobe InDesign.

InDesign was a brand new piece of software to me that I was not familiar with prior to my preliminary task. I learned that InDesign can be used to create a number of different media products including particular print products such as magazines and newspaper publications. Through experimentation with various tools, I learned a number of new skills, including how to correctly insert images into the document by using the rectangle frame tool, into which an image can easily be dragged and dropped. I learned how to use different text effects to drop shadows behind letters and objects, create an inner glow to headings and to add heavy, thin, patterned and coloured outlines to text using the Stroke and colour selection tools. I learned that using a minimised amount of fonts throughout one media product helps to keep the overall look of the result consistent, neat, attractive and easily approachable and understandable.

I learned more about the conventional layouts of music magazines and how to arrange text for articles into columns and use guidelines to ensure all objects on an InDesign page are neatly and accurately arranged and aligned. These tools enabled me to create professional looking mastheads and titles that conform to the general style that most modern magazines adopt. I now understand that the style, colour, size, effects and arrangement of text are very significant when attempting to address and cater for a particular target audience and in giving off a particular impression with the final result and I learned exactly how to meet these requirements with the appropriate tools and features in InDesign.

Luckily Photoshop was software that is highly familiar to me so I was able to use this to help me to edit photographs and, in some cases, text, for use within my magazine on InDesign. Although I did not learn any new skills through my use of Photoshop since I already knew how to use it in depth, I did get chance to practice and use the skills I already had during the process of constructing my product. In terms of photo editing, to maintain the particular look and style that I wanted to achieve with my product, I felt that little editing was necessary for my photos. For two of my 5 final images, I simply cropped them to be a suitable size, cut out any unnecessary parts of the background that exposed the studio setting and backdrop, and then finished them off with alterations to the brightness and contrast, gave them a subtle photo filter and used very light airbrushing. I felt that over-editing the images to the point where they appeared to be obviously airbrushed looked inappropriate for my magazine as few music magazines edit their images in this way; overly airbrushed images tend to be on the front cover of fashion or celebrity magazines rather than music magazines where the general image of the magazine’s stars is less important than the rest of the magazine and its content. Through initially giving the people in my images a fully airbrushed look, I did learn that this was not effective and looked wrong against the rest of my magazine, and I therefore scrapped this kind of edit and followed my final approach of subtle editing and enhancements using the spot-healing tool and the blur tool to subtly heal over any obvious imperfections on the models’ complexions and to give the overall image a smooth look without making any changes look obvious. I learned that using a combination of Photoshop and InDesign was effective as this then allows you to place images into your product that have been edited to suit the magazine’s style, layout and colour scheme and achieve a professional finish.

In addition to InDesign and Photoshop, I also learned more about how to use the blogging website WordPress.com. WordPress is a site you can use to create simple blogs, and we used this site to upload all our Media work relating to our magazines and any related posts. I learned how to categorise my posts into different sections to ensure each piece of work and each part of my project was easy to locate, and also how to put them into the correct date order. I learned how to upload different media onto my account including both pictures and PDF files which I could then easily insert into my posts.