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Throughout the development of my magazine I have used several different programs and
tools to help plan, design and publish my magazine. These tools include web applications
which are easy to use and can be used on any device, to professional software which requires
learning how to use properly before being able to create a professional looking magazine,
and could only be used in college. Before starting my magazine, I made a reader
profile containing products that people who listen to dance music like, as a pitch to
advertisers. These are also produced by media conglomerates such as Bauer Media and are
included in media packs that they send out to potential advertisers of their magazines.
For this I made a basic A4-sized document in Adobe Photoshop, which I already had basic
knowledge in at the time. The items I have included are products I believe that listeners
of dance music enjoy using, such as Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, an increasingly popular
headphone brand in the industry, Apple’s iPhone, a popular smartphone which many people
in the 18-30 age range own, and a Volkswagen Golf which is a car most young drivers drive.
Also shown are DJs people in the age range listen to such as David Guetta, deadmau5 and
Skrillex. On top of all of this is the description of my average reader. This task was quite
easy to produce and only took an hour or two in class to produce. I have applied effects
such as glows and drop shadows on some of the items to save them from blending in with
other items on the page, which would look more crowded if not used. I then used this
in a PowerPoint presentation to my class and then sent out a SurveyMonkey questionnaire
online. I used the responses of this questionnaire to help with the rest of the planning of my
magazine. I designed my logo for my magazine in Photoshop
at home. This took me about 15 minutes to make the original version, which is the one
seen in early versions of the magazine. For this I used a font I downloaded from the internet
and added an outer glow in light blue and a black and white gradient inside the text.
The logo was originally going to be slightly diagonal across the top left corner, but this
didn’t look right in the final copy so I changed it so it is horizontal.
I then went on to designing my cover page for my magazine in Photoshop. This involved
me creating a number of elements that feature in the cover pages of music magazines. My
images of my magazine were taken on my Canon EOS 1100D digital SLR camera, which I have
owned for about seven months now, so I found taking the pictures to be an easy job for
me. I have used a number of tools that Photoshop offers to edit the picture. I used the healing
brush around the model’s face to remove spots and other imperfections. I used the
burn tool to reduce the amount of red-eye and the dodge tool to whiten the rest of his
eyes. I also patched up part of his jeans using the stamp tool and then the healing
brush. I then used the quick selection tool to select the background of the image and
remove it, and applying a feather on the selection so the edges don’t look as untidy once removed.
Then I used the eraser tool to smooth around the edges of my model, then on a separate
layer created a gradient to replace the dull wallpaper, and applied a glow to the outside
of my model. The same tools were applied for the images on the contents page, which were
taken in the same location. I added a black and white filter to the picture in the bottom
right, and increased the saturation on the models t-shirt in the image in the centre.
The other image on the cover page was heavily edited from the original due to the fact that
one of the people in the picture has already appeared on the same page. The setting for
this picture was in my back garden, and because of all the background elements it was a lot
harder to get all of the background out, however I did manage to do this just fine by using
the lasso tool and the quick selection tool. I used the healing brush a few times to tidy
up the picture and replaced the background with something a bit more genre-friendly.
On top of this I added an orange filter to the picture and a glow around the models in
the picture. I then realised that I would have to take one of my models out to keep
the picture. So I used the lasso tool to select my model and deleted him from the image, then
selected my model on the right of him, and moved him towards the other two models and
used the puppet-warp tool to move his head to a slightly different position. I then cropped
the rest of the image to portrait and inserted it into my cover page. The image on the double
page spread was an easy one to edit. The image was taken at night outside, the only one in
the magazine to have this done. The picture itself was good enough to use because of its
use of positive/negative space, but to make it good for my magazine I flipped the image
around and applied a gradient map to the image to make the model black and white and the
rest of the image coloured. The night lights work as a background to the double page spread
and aren’t distracting due to its shallow depth of field. The textual elements of my
page were made by using the same font throughout, and created black boxes where text is to stand
out from the rest of the page. The contents page and double page spread were
made in Adobe InDesign, software which I had never used before this project. The software
helped me to make these pages as real as possible to an actual music magazine. I have used column
guides to align all of my elements to the page and to get it exactly how I want it to
be. To place my images, I drew four content boxes to fit within the columns, so my pictures
would fit perfect on the page. I have placed large page numbers in the bottom right of
these images to anchor them to the list of pages on the right, and added a ‘cover story’
icon I made in Photoshop to the main image. In the features section, the page numbers
are bigger than the two lines of text about the articles. For this I managed to change
the line spacing so the page number would fit on both lines. In my double page spread,
I used four columns and a decent spaced gutter to keep each paragraph of text separate, and
I justified the text to spread the width of the columns. I have placed my image across
the whole of the page, because of its simple background. I have also added a text box with
a pull quote, outlined in white. Drawing this was easier than with Photoshop, where I had
to draw a box and write the text over it. There is also a slug at the top of the page
to signal that this is the cover story. During my project I have been keeping track
of my progress by using Posterous, a blogging service that was recently acquired by Twitter.
I have posted each lesson what I have to do, what I have learnt and how I can improve.
I also posted all of my work including the pages and videos I have made throughout the
course.