Diary 13

I am now at a stage where I have completed the final pages of my magazine. I have created a final version of my front cover, contents page and double page spreads. When doing this, I had to take into account the feedback I recieved for my first drafts and make the changes necessary to improve my magazine and raise my mark. I originally recieved a C for my magazine first draft however, after i had recieved feedback from my peers on my contents page, I decided that it would be worthwhile for my to dedicate some lessons to drastically improving my contents page.This is one of the major changes I made and once I asked my peers what they thought once the appropriate changes had been made, they said that the page looked a lot better and the layout made it look a lot more proffessional. Another major change that I made to my work was chaging my front cove image. I wasn't happy at all with the pose that my model had or the size of the shot as I thought that it distanced her from the readers instead of creating the illusion of closeness and the potential to build a relationship with the artist. Therefore I decided that a mid-shot or close-up would be the best shot sizes to give this effect so I changed my front cover image to a mid-shot. Lastly, I was told that I had too much blank space on my second double page spread so I made the text and images fit on to a single page, thus minimising white space an making the page look a lot more busy.

Final Coursework

Final Front Cover:

The changes I made to my front cover weren't entirely challenging in any way, but I believe that they made a big difference in the way it looks visually. I decided to change my front cover image to a close up because I felt that a close up had more of a dramatic effect on the reader and is build a feel of closeness between the readers and the model. Other changes I made included messing with colours and fonts to ensure that the text could be easily read and looked like it fitted well together. I also changes the layout of my sell lines to make sure that there was little blank space around the image and I removed the gradient to make the page look brighter and clearer to look at. I feel that my image stands out more without the gradient on the page. 

Final Contents Page:

I spent a few lessons focusing on the major improvements that I needed to make to my contents page. Before, I feel that my contents page had no clear layout and the text was just spread all over the page. Also, the size of my text was way too big and the images that I included were too small. Therefore one major change that I made to the page was adding a different section for features, news and reviews. I kept these to one side of the page and kept the band index on the left as it was before. I then improved my subscription details box by adding clearer instructions on how the readers can subscribe to my magazine. I then added a much larger image of my main featured artist in the middle of all the text and worked the other, small images around it. I added a small image of my first double page spread with the image as I had found that this was common throughout other music magazines. The last change I made was finding out how to display the title, 'contents'. I found this difficult at first because I didn't want awkward white spaces that I couldn't fill at the top of the page. Instead I decided to align the parts of the text differently and place the two images around it, thus creating minimal white space.

Final Double Page Spread 1:

 

I didn't need to make that many changes to this page, however I did have to remove some of the text as there wasn't enough article for my second page. Instead I made a gradient to fill the space where I had previously placed two collumns of text. I also added a stroke to my pull quote as members of my target audience had previously said that this was quite difficult to read. Another change I made was in differenciating between the questions and the answers in my article. I did this by usig different coloured texts. I also justified the text so it looked a lot more professional and tidy on the page. The final change I made was using the text wrapping tool to add credits that curved around the guitar in my main image and this shows off some of the skills I have employed whilst using Photoshop.

Final Single Page:

The biggest change that I was told to make to this page was to make it a single page as opposed to a double. This was because there was a lot of blank space in the center of the page. The only other option was to add more text but I thought that it would make more of an impact if I made the page look full. I added one more question to fill in some of the blank space at the top of the page and I moved the polaroid images to the bottom on the right. I wanted to keep the image of Ria on this page as I thought that it was one of the best that I took. Firstly I thought that I could change the opacity of the image and have it in the background, but I thought that it looked much more dramatic in full capacity. However, I felt that the rest of the background looked to empty so I thought about adding a gradient here. My teacher then advised that I took an image of a collage created out of CD's, pages of old magazines, headphones etc. and add a gradient to that to created a better background that would be a better way of earning marks. I also added a stroke to this pull quote so it was also easier to read and matched the quote on the other page. The final change I made was using the levels tool to make my images look brighter and stand out more.

Audience Feedback

Below is a copy of a table that I completed after I received feedback on the first draft of my magazine. I asked a number of people from my target audience to take a look at the pages I had created and give me advice on what I should change or what I could add or what should stay the same. I then used this table to conclude what I found and how I was planning on using the feedback to make the suggested improvements.
Audience Feedback Form

Front Cover with Comments

Contents Page with Comments

Double Page Spread 1 with Comments

Double Page Spread 2 with Comments