My Pre-Liminary Task

For my pre-liminary task I had to produce a front page of a college magazine, complete with medium close-up of a front page model. I had to create a realistic and effective magazine for my target audience (college students) by creating headlines and an effective and catchy masthead. As well as this, I needed to create a contents page, making sure I included some of my own images. After this, I needed to develop and evaluation that included how my magazine presented teenagers, who my target audience was and how I've attracted them with my product, plus the skills I'd picked up along the way.

Looking back over my pre-lim, I can see how my skills have developed over the year. Obviously my skills using programs such as Photoshop and InDesign have developed greatly, this is clear to see simply by looking at my pre-lim product and then at my final product! My deconstruction skills have also developed. This is clear by looking at my evaluation. Whilst I covered a lot of ground on why I had done certain things, I had failed to come up with helpful products such as a reader profile, which I created to complete my music magazine. This prevented me from deconstruction certain design features for example why I had created long headline descriptions or laid the front page out in the way that I had. I also use a lot more detail in my deconstructions and evaluations now. In my pre-lim my evaluation does not go into quite enough detail in describing and explaining my motives behind certain features, although I do cover the basics for example why I took a picture of a 16 year old girl for my cover - to appeal to others of her age which is my target audience etc. Whilst I managed to cover the basics I did not go in to detail as afar as I did for my music magazine where I was able to describe why I used certain colours and why I included everything including particular people.

After creating my pre-lim I learnt that planning is an absolute necessity. When creating my pre-lim, I did not do a lot of planning, if any. I did not plan the layout nor the pose for my model I just threw myself into it. This was a good lesson to learn in preparation for my final music magazine, where I planned everything from the pose of my model to her clothes and positioning. This helped ensure I created the product I had in mind and gave me time and opportunity to develop my ideas to the best that they could be. This also gave me time in the long run to play around with features and so that they were the attractive and appealing to my target audience.

Similarly to planning, research played a huge role. I did not do a lot of research for my pre-liminary magazine and instead used the knowledge I already had of my target audience and what they may find appealing. This restricted me to only creating the simplest and most basic product for my target audience. However, when creating my music magazine, I researched what my audience were interested in by conducting a survey (the results of which are recorded in both written and graph form in my scrap book, but I no longer have access to due to a broken USB stick - the results I do have in graph form however are in previous posts!). This gave me feedback on everything from where they holiday to what they drink. Thus helping me create a product which was exactly what my audience wanted from everything from artists to include and even the kind of layout and colour scheme they find most appealing! Creating a reader profile also helped me produce the perfect product for them.

By deconstructing other music magazines double page spreads, front pages and contents pages, I was able to get an idea of what my audience look for and what magazine pages typically look like (I then had the option to conform to this or to make my pages different). Whilst I looked at some magazine pages for guidance for my pre-lim, I did not specifically look at college magazine pages in the way that I looked at music magazines with either similar genres to mine or just in general, for my final magazine product.

Constructing my pages also became a lot easier. This was obviously because when I created my pre-lim I only had the basic guidance from my teacher to know what I was doing, I had no idea how to use Photoshop and had only used some features such as inserting text and pictures into InDesign. By learning the basics on my pre-lim, I was given therefore given time to develop my skills by playing around with the programs and seeing what tools I liked using and how I could use them to the best of my ability. Therefore it was only natural that my final products be a lot more developed, effective and professional looking to that of my pre-lim!