Evaluation Question 7

Here are my two videos to show how my preliminary task compares to my finished music magazine. In the first video I have compared my front covers, and in the second video I compared my contents pages.
In case the audio isn't clear I will post an overview of what I have said below the video.

When I created my college magazine I had never used photoshop before so I knew how to use the basics of the software which is why the front cover looks very minimal compared to my music magazine. 

Obviously the genre of the two magazines is very different so the look of the magazine is bound to be different, you'd expect a college magazine to be more widely appealing and a punk/alternative magazine to have a more edgy feel.

As you can see the simple layout hasn't really changed but I have used it more effectively with my music magazine. There is a lot of black blank space on my college magazine whereas my music magazine is packed full of information and images. 

My photography has also improved dramatically between the two covers. A lot of shadows fall on Adams face in my college magazine making the image not as clear whereas I found a spot to take photographs in clear daylight for my music magazine overall making the image clearer, and my editing skills were put to the test here, as I smoothed out parts of josh's skin using the spot healing tool, but not too much so he looked fake, and I also adjusted the brightness and contrast of the image to work accordingly. The other photos along the bottom of my cover show that I did take a lot of photos to find the right shots, I have 3 extra models and one has a nature themed background, and the two are made to look like they have stood in front of a coloured backdrop, however I just cut out the original backgrounds and created a drop shadow. The other photo is one of my own photos from a gig that I went to this varies the use of technology since I used my phone for this photo and makes my cover look different and more appealing.

I kept one font for my college magazine making the cover look really boring and plain, but I changed this for my music magazine, I downloaded my own font and used that as a unique font for my masthead and I also downloaded another separate font to the rest for my bring me the horizon cover line, the font is quite similar to their band logo. For the rest of the magazine I used a sharp, bold font that is easy to read so I used the Impact font.

The layout is completely different, I had an idea for my college magazine that with my limited skill and knowledge at the time I was unable to carry out successfully. However after doing research into my genre of music magazine the layout became more clean cut and a lot simpler than what I had planned for my college magazine. Both contents pages have a white background but again excessive amounts of space was an issue in my college magazine. My music contents page however has filled the space without looking too crowded. And the amount of writing is split with images making the whole page easier to read and looks like it has a clear section by section guide line. 

Imagery was also a massive difference. My college magazine has one image off the Internet to relate to a mine craft related cover line, but that is it none of my own photos. My music magazine on the other hand uses all of my own photos, again varying the use of technology I used my phone for 4 out of the 5 pictures, and again two of these photos were from gigs corresponding with cover lines I had chosen. 

My colour scheme ties in well with the front cover making the two pages look related and definitely belong to the same magazine, whereas my college magazine since it was unfinished could have belonged anywhere. 

Again I used the same font throughout my college contents page showing no creativity or experimentation, but on my music magazine I continued the font scheme through from the front cover to the contents page again tying in nicely as a magazine on a whole. 

My contents page uses a lot of different features since I have added red rectangles to section off the page, and added black rectangles to section off different features in the magazine. My photographed features also have their own red triangles to promote that feature more with the page number inside as an easy guide. 

Overall i know that my music magazine was much more of a success than my college magazine. My photoshop skills have developed massively over the course of the first year allowing me to experiment more meaning my music magazine could have it's own uniqueness and not having to adjust to my own limitations.