Blog write up – Abbi Kelly

Last week during the process of making my magazine front cover and article I successfully managed to finish my Front cover which I am proud of as I think it has turned out quite good in my opinion, whilst making my front cover I have developed quite a few skills in Photoshop, which has helped me to make my front cover to the best of my ability. One of the trickier things I didn’t know how to do was using the ‘Pen tool’ in InDesign which you can use to cut things out and make them go above other layers along with many other things, this was great for making the head of my model go above the title of the magazine, My teacher taught me how to do this and it was very successful in making my magazine look professional and just how I wanted it, this is one of the many skills that I gained, I also gained a lot of skills using InDesign as I’d never used it before and learnt a lot from the lessons on how to use it. Last week I had also downloaded a font which is simple to do as we were taught this right at the beginning of the course, this made my magazine title have a unique font to it and it also ties in with the other fonts used for the headers and small print writing which was Arial rounded as the title has discrete rounded edges on the letters. One thing that didn’t go so well last week was when I thought my magazine cover was finished first time it wasn’t because my text wasn’t in line as I went outside of my rulers on Photoshop which made the magazine look less professional and untidy, but I listened to the advice of my teacher and straightened everything up using the rulers which now makes it look a lot more like a real magazine in my opinion because you don’t ever get magazines that are untidy, messy and don’t line up.

 

This print screen shows what I achieved after using the pen tool in Photoshop which made my models head go in front of the magazine title, showing that I successfully gained a skill here and I now feel confident in doing it, this skill was a really good one to have learnt as it made my magazine look a lot more professional looking in my opinion.

One thing I thought went particularly well was my Photographs that I’d taken at my photo shoot they were very successful and were easy to do as I knew everything I was doing thanks to my Photo shoot plan. I learnt that if you are doing a photo shoot you must be well organised otherwise I might not go as well as you’d like, the experience has taught me this as I was very well organised and everything went great and was quick and easy to do, I think if I didn’t have a plan and I wasn’t organised and ready for it, it was have gone wrong and would have affected my photographs. There were no issues with my Photographs I was very pleased with them, although honestly a few of them were burry, but overall I was happy with the results.

Examples of my photography from my photo shoot:

Last week I came across a problem and this is one of the downfalls of my project in my opinion, now realising that it was very important to get everything done in time. I was writing my article but parts of it became quite hard to write as I hadn’t done very good detailed alcohol research, this then caused me to stop what I was doing and go back to my research and do more as I hadn’t done some of it in the first place and there was not enough. This is quite time consuming and put me behind on my work. Writing my article took longer than expected because of this and this also made things go in the wrong order as I should have done my research properly before writing my article. Although this made writing my article more difficult I did have an article and paragraph plan that helped me a lot when writing it, so this was a plus. If I could have done anything differently during this project it would have been making sure everything was done and done to a good standard before moving onto something else as it made things more complicated.