WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNT ABOUT TECHNOLOGIES FROM THE PROCESS OF CONSTRUCTING THIS PRODUCT?Evaluation- Question 6

THE BEGINNING. When I first began my media coursework, I was expected to use Blogger, Photoshop and InDesign; two of which I had no clue how to use.

BLOGGER.

Firstly, I signed up for Blogger and taught myself the ropes. I think that blogger is a very easy site to navigate and use effectively once you know what you’re doing.

PHOTOSHOP. I already had some previous experience from my secondary school and at home, of Photoshop, however it is a very complex software, and I only needed to use it to crop, retouch and take away part of the colour of an image. I managed this successfully and below is the result:

INDESIGN. In class we had a tutorial on the basics of InDesign. At first I found it hard to use and would have preferred to construct my magazine on Photoshop as I had a familiarity with it. However, with more practice I am now able to use the software effectively and confidently.

TECHNOLOGIES AND THE MAGAZINE INDUSTRY.

The magazine industry has significantly advanced since the internet has existed and new technologies have emerged. Publishers can now publish their magazines and publications online and most magazines have their own websites, with free, extra content that isn’t necessarily included in the physical publication.

The magazine industry now relies on modern technology in order to advance it’s product, and without it, wouldn’t be the same. Below are some examples of how the magazine industry utilize modern technologies to their advantage:

INDESIGN- TEXT FUNCTIONS.

These are the basic features that I had to use in order to edit the text on my magazine design, and that are used to create magazines in the industry. I got to grips with them quite easily and used them to the best of my ability . Ultimately, I think InDesign is a good program to use to construct magazines creatively, rather than Photoshop, which I originally expected to be better.

FINAL RESULTS USING THE IMAGE FEATURE

This is a simple image of a barcode from Google, used to demonstrate how I utilised image features on InDesign. Firstly, I set up a placeholder to import the image into. To import the image I selected ‘file, place’ and then browsed for the image I wanted to use. Once it was placed in the placeholder I adjusted the width, length and height accordingly and I used the rotation icon to rotate the image slightly. I found InDesign relatively easy to use when it came to importing images and placing them appropriately etc.

CONCLUSION.

In conclusion, I feel that from when I started the course in September to now in earl 2014, I have improved massively. I went from not being able to use InDesign at all to having produced my magazine front cover, contents page and double page spread all on the program. These are shown below: