Final Double Page Spread

Finally, I added a red rectangle around the 'This Month's Playlist' Section and added a black edge to the left hand side of it. I also made specific words the pull quotes from the article bigger than the others, to show importance and made the outside 'Stroke' red, to compliment my house theme. I did the same to my 'Exclusive interview' text and then made the 'Josie' headline text red. I purposely dressed my model in a black tshirt with a red and white image on it so she would fit in with my general house theme of red, white, black and light grey. Also, the t-shirt is purposely a Reading festival one to make her seem like a 'normal' person and also because the festival fits in with my magazine's genre. I also changed the page number to the font 'Adler' also to compliment the house theme. I made my the picture of my model slightly smaller so that it would not take up too much space in the article and distract the reader from the text.

Double Page Spread - Version 2

First I added two pull quotes from my interview that I thought would stand out; "It's not untrue that there's a lot my fans don't know about me" and "They were really bitter at how I became famous... when nobody even knows their names" in the font Adler. I also added 'Exclusive Interview" in capital letters in the font Trashed. I also changed the font on the "Hear the playlist, see the videos and more on Arena.com!" from Dirt2 death to 28 days later to compliment my house theme and for continuity reasons, as the previous font wasn't used anywhere else. I also added a photograph of my model. I made it large so it would be like a typical music magazine and also so that the article stood out. I text merged my photo, so the text would flow around it rather than just having square edges.

Photo for my Double page spread

This is the photo I will use for my double page spread. As you can see, I have cut her from the original background in the second photo and in the third photo, I have adjusted the contract and brightness and added a slight drop shadow.

Double Page Spread First Version

First, I added "Josie Reveals all in an exclusive interview!" in the font 28 Days Later. the word "Josie" is a lot bigger than the rest to emphasise the importance and also to show the audience clearly what the article is about. Then I added my main body text in size 12 Arial font. Then, I added a rectangle to show where my photo would be, as I hadn't taken one I liked yet. Then I added a 'This Month's Playlist' section, to make my magazine look like it contained a lot of content. The headin of this was in 'Impact Label' font which i purposely used as I hadn't used the font anywhere else. This was to show that my magazine has a particlar style for each type of article. The song and artist names were written in Adler font and were purposely quite a lot bigger than the main body text. I also added page numbers alongside the "Arena" logo to signify a house style. The font at the bottom of the downloads column saying "Hear the playlist, see the videos and more at Arena.com!" is in the font dirt2 death and was put in this font to make it stand out. The reason I mentioned the website was also to make my magazine seem like a real magazine which would have multi-platform elements, such as Kerrang! and NME.

Magazine Evaluation- Question Seven

Looking back at your preliminary task (the school magazine task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

Looking back at my preliminary task (School magazine) I feel that I have learnt a lot in the progression from making that and making my music magazine. For example, for the preliminary task we used fonts that were already stored on the system. However, when we did our music magazine we used dafont.com to carefully select which fonts we would like to use in our magazine ourselves, meaning more thought was put into picking the 'right' font. Also, we had more experience with using Photoshop so all of the editing looks much better and more professional. Another thing we learnt was that the photos had to be perfect to be featured, not at all blurred or pixellated amongst other things. I also learnt how to use the blogging website 'Blogger' to post my work online, which took some getting used to as I had never used a blog before.
In my First magazine's front cover, all I really did was use my photo as the whole front cover background and added writing and the school logo on the top. Also, as I did not cut my models out of the background, the only real editing I did to the picture was to change the brightness and contrast of the photo. Also, I may have used light blue and maroon as my house theme as they are the school colours, but this should have been changed as the blue fonts just blended in to the background. I also added hardly any cover lines, just a competition and some information on an article about school stress.

In my first contents page, I didn't really know how to lay it out and it wasn't even rectangular. The text was in a standard, boring font and took up far too much of the page. The photograph was just put in the middle of the page and there was no reason behind it. Also, it looked like it could have been made on Microsoft paint, rather than Photoshop. For the title I just used the same font as my front cover and it was far too large. I also added the school logo for continuity.

Magazine Evaluation- Question Six

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

The process of creating this music magazine has shown me that constructing such products involves spending a lot of time and effort using technology such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe In Design to create the finished end product. The preliminary task was the first time I had ever used Photoshop and In Design, so it took a while to get used to.
I have learnt how complex Adobe Photoshop is and that every single effect must be in a separate layer and that cutting out a person from the background of a photo (whether using the magic wand tool, or other tools) is incredibly complicated and hard to get right. The tasks we were set to help us get to know Photoshop were very helpful and showed us what tools did what and how to completely transform images. Once I got the hang of how to use Photoshop, I was able to do whatever I wanted to my magazine's front cover and contents page to make them look as professional as possible. After using Photoshop I can see why it is the ''standard' and possible even most popular photo-editing program.


I have also learnt that there is a lot more to using a publishing program like Adobe In Design, than meets the eye. For example, I did not know you could merge your text around your photograph or carry on text that didn't fit into one text box into another. I was suprised how different it was to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher, which were the only similar programs I had used beforehand. I was also surprised that for two completely different programs, Photoshop and In Design had quite a few similarities, for example they both had common tools including the text and selection tools.



I also learnt how to use an Apple Macintosh computer. Before starting the preliminary task, I had never used a Mac before and getting used to the differences between Mac computers and Windows computers took time, as even the keyboard shortcuts that I thought were standard were completely different on the Mac. However, the two softwares did turn out to share some similarities, so the Macintosh operating system was not too difficult to get used to.


Also, I have learnt how to take professional-looking photos, as before this year I had never owned my own camera, let alone taken pictures for a particular purpose- to look like an authentic music magazine front cover. I also learnt that you have to painstakingly pick what your model has to wear (genre-specific clothing etc) or to select which photos to include, making sure that they have no faults whatsoever (blurring, out-of-place props, the wrong body language/facial expression).

I have also learnt how to use the blogging website, Blogger which was totally different to any school-work I had ever done before, as the only other schoolwork I had done using a computer was just Microsoft Word, Publisher, Excel or Access documents, but never anything web-based (besides emailing documents to teachers). I had also never used a blogging website for anything before, let alone Blogger in particular. I did not know how to post anything, let alone edit or add attachments so it took quite a while to get used to.