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

At the start of my project I only knew the basics of the software which I was using, only the stuff which I had learnt from my prelimenary task at the start of the year. I knew how to add a background to something and how to use certain fading techniques. When I did create my preliminary exercise of a magazine I came across the red eye tool which was able to get rid of red eyes, I found this extremely helpful as it made the picture look much better without the red eye but I did not need to use this tool for my mock ups or final product for my music magazine.

Throughout the time in which I have been creating my magazine I have been discovering new techniques on how to improve designs and how to improve the look of my magazine overall. Before I started AS media studies I did not know how to download fonts or how to copy them into Paintshop Pro but now I am able to do this efficiently. Whilst using Paintshop Pro to edit the pictures to go in the magazine the use of Qwark express was extremely useful. This piece of software allowed me to set the size of the paper needed perfectly to be able to crop the images to the correct size, change the colours on the magazine to whatever I wanted and in general helped me to create a good product at the end of the project.

The layers on Paintshop Pro were extremely useful as it meant that I was able to import a picture and then create different fonts and styles on top of it so that the magazine would look more realistic. This would be much more difficult if I had to do it by hand as I would not be able to create as perfect finish as I could using the computer technology as otherwise to create layers I would have to stcick them on top of each other on a piece of paper and this would not look very proffessional!

These pieces of software although take a while to be able to fully understand as there are lots of different tools available. Overall I think that this helps people who are wanting to make it in the industry and create their own magazines. This means that even amateurs who have no previous knowledge of how to produce a magazine. I think that with this software they would be able to create a magazine which could in effect compete with the mainstream magazines available for sale in the shops.

I learnt about http://www.blogger.com/ which I had never used before. I had never even written a blog before and it was interesting to learn how to inpot all my information and pictures onto this website.
Using this website to create a log of what I had done with my project helped me to keep track of what I had learnt and what I had done with my project and also what could be done to improve my project as it was all layed out in front of me and I was able to access it from any area.
Using a blog also helped me to present my information in a clear and understandable way, without this I think that it would have been more difficult to organise what I needed to say and so therefore overall makes it much more accessible for readers.

I mainly used magazines to research into my target audience and to put together ideas of the forms and conventions of my target audience. However when doing my research I did look at some websites to try and get an even more in depth look at what fonts/colours they use and what kind of information they may include on the website.
For example I looked at

http://www.nme.com/

and

http://www.kerrang.co.uk/

This is so I could look at my tareget audience and see how others use the forms and conventions for this genre.

Technology has been useful as I have been able to upload my blog regularly on what has been done during my project, I have also uploaded pictures so the use of cameras has also helped me greatly and scanners so I could scan the pictures in to the computer.