What Have You Learnt About Technologies From

The Process Of Constructing This Product?

BY LOUISE BUNN

OVERVIEW • Generally I found that the use of different technologies was empowering

because it allowed me to have a number of different choices of how I wanted to lay the process of developing my magazine out. • However at times the use of technology impacted on the creativity of

developing a magazine because technology restricts what you are able to do whereas there is far more flexibility with physical work. • I found that once you have started with working with technology then it is

difficult to go back to working on paper as you have less boundaries of how you have to set out your work on paper.

BLOGGER • Blogger served as a good foundation for my work but that I needed to use it in conjunction with other publishing tools as you are very

limited with how you can publish work on Blogger. • Sometimes it was confusing to publish work from other publishing tools on Blogger at times because once you have published on that

publishing tool then you have to get an embed code, which is sometimes difficult to find. • Blogger was easy to use if I was publishing scanned in documents that I had originally do0ne on paper because then I only had to use the

simple process of getting an embed code from Scribd then using this to publish on Blogger. • It was straightforward to publish images from my photoshoot on Blogger but these were not set out well as there was just a line of images

so I preferred using Thinglink because this enabled me to make the images interactive using captions to critique and explain the process. • It was frustrating that the posts on were always in chronological order and even if you sort them by label they appear in chronological order.

At times it would have been more logical for the blog posts to have been ordered differently. • It was very restricting typing text into Blogger itself because it does not let you structure it in any way such as with paragraphs and just

appears as a large block of text. I only used text in Blogger once when I felt the other publishing options wouldn’t work because I wanted to annotate my mood board but had run out of room on the paper.

SCRIBD • Scribd was a useful tool for publishing documents, particularly short documents, as all you had to

do was upload the document and put the embed code into Blogger. • On the other hand, I found that Scribd was quite restricting because you had to save documents

as a PDF before uploading them otherwise Scribd would alter the structure.• This meant that if you had any changes that needed to be made to the document you would have

to go back to the document and change them on that as you could not edit the document after it had been published in Scribd. • I found Scribd was only useful for short documents or documents containing images as the layout

wouldn’t look very good if the document was several pages long as it would be put in a vertical line which would make the document less coherent.

PREZI• I found Prezi simple to use because all you have to do is set the text out in

the boxes as you would do in a mind map on paper. • Sometimes it was difficult to fit the text in the boxes because they seem to be

designed for small amounts of text and I needed to use quite a lot of text to explain my magazine.• It was a clear way of setting out information I had found out about my

audience although the templates you are given tend to be a bit rigid so I had to alter the amount of text boxes and the movement path of the presentation.

ISSUU• This was well suited to producing a magazine because it is used as a

magazine publisher for other publications so is suited to this particular form of media product. • This publisher makes the pages of the document turn as if the consumer was

reading an actual magazine but in a digital format which I found was very appropriate. • In contrast, I came across some difficulties in using this platform because I

wanted to publish my magazine analyses document, which was done on paper, on Issuu but I didn’t because I thought that this would be too difficult because the document was on A3 paper and was different orientations so I instead used Scribd.

PHOTOSHOP• I found that Photoshop was fairly simple to use once I had got used to the

different tools that I would need to use for certain tasks.• I found that this was very freeing because if the image went wrong then you

could remove the layer or start again. • I found that it was a bit restrictive using some tools of Photoshop because the

require working directly on the background so it is harder to remove any mistakes however I found that I could overcome this by duplicating the background layer.

INDESIGN • I found InDesign very straightforward to use once I was familiar with the tools

and the only issues I found was when I didn’t know what tool to use for a task but this was easily overcome by watching a tutorial which explained what the tools did.• InDesign was very easy to use and allowed me to get the columns of text,

captions, folios and images in line with each other using the grid of columns that are in the background for guidance.