Evaluation: Question 7

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

 
My full cover                                      My preliminary cover

 
My full contents page                         My preliminary contents page

My final cover looks much more professional;

-          The editing of the picture for the final magazine looks more real as I had a better grasp of Photoshop,
-          The articles are in line (compared to all over the place in prelim),
-          The font is much more visible on the final one.
-          The font for the final one fits much better with the style of the magazine.
-          The picture in the prelim magazine looks as if it is spontaneous not planned.
-          The final has a bar code, allowing the customers to pay for it; however, it isn’t needed in the prelim magazine as it is free.
-          The title is much brighter in the final magazine, grabbing the consumers’ attention.
-          The layout of the final magazine is much neater and more professional than the prelim which is all over the place in terms of layout

I feel I have evolved much more advanced editing skills, especially on Photoshop. As the picture in the finished cover looks realistic, whereas the eyes and teeth in the preliminary task quite frankly look scary. This is because I didn't know when to stop with the dodge tool, now though, I feel that my skills are much better, and I know the limits when editing a person to ensure that they look realistic. I feel that without doing the preliminary product, however, my final piece would have been just as bad as my Photoshop skills wouldn't have been as finely tuned as they are now.

I have also learnt new skills on Photoshop, how to add makeup for example, which I did with the dodge tool on the cover picture as it wasn't quite how I wanted it.

When it comes to layout skills on InDesign, my skills have improved drastically, as I was new to using InDesign, and found it extremely complex, so not knowing how to layout a magazine didn't help here at all.
After looking at other covers for both tasks, I found it easier to see how to lay things out, however, for my preliminary products the layout is too spaced out and doesn't look professional (although that may have something to do with the fact that I just looked at magazines other students had made to help make mine). For my finished products I had a much better idea of what I was doing, and they look much more professional, this is shown a greatly with each comparison, as the article titles are all over the place on the preliminary cover, and are too spaced out on the contents page.
Another thing that has improved is my idea of what fonts should be used. The preliminary tasks use a calligraphy type font for the front cover in too many colours that doesn't look good, and a simple font for the rest of it that looks amateurish which looks even worse paired with the overly-big numbers.

I think I can safely say that I have learnt a lot more when it comes to what does and doesn't work in a magazine since my preliminary task, and that the preliminary task helped my to hone my editing skills.