Evaluation for preliminary task

Evaluation

The target audience for my magazine is student mainly female due to the use of the colour pink relating more to females than males. All of the cover lines and headlines relate to college life helping to guide the audience in wanting to get advice in these kinds of areas. Direct mode address helps the audience connect with the magazine making them want to buy it, also as the main image is a male this could also influence the reader ship  and make it more likely to be females.

The strengths I have found that I have within this project are that I have made a magazine with a brand identity that is appealing to the eye and it hits the target audience criteria. I am very proud of my magazine creation. Strength would be I was able to pick up the basics of Photoshop fairly quickly. I was scared at first to use the program as it looked so complicated and I was scared of loosing my work, but I overcame the fear and got on with it I could always ask teacher for help.

I was very pleased with the pictures I took for this project so I think of this strength. As they where really good quality and they really fitted with the theme and colour scheme of the front cover and contents page, and slotted in nicely with the themes of college. The use of simple typefaces and of the same type between cover and contents make it look consistent between pages. As I used san-serif font which I think makes it more appealing to the target market of students as with serif fonts are usually used to attract an older audience.

          The challenges I have faced during this project are some technical problems with Photoshop. For example the bottom bar on my magazine cover is linked on the same layer as a piece of text so I couldn’t change the colour of the text! Which I wanted to because it didn’t look good, in the end I asked for help. Found out a way to change the shadows on the text and add textures without it being a text layer doing this made the magazine look so much better. As all the colours that I was using didn’t go together very well there were too many colours so I ended up picking four main colours for the cover. Another technical problem I faced was that Photoshop froze and it deleted my contents page but it didn’t take me so long to redo it, so it was ok.

          Photoshop seemed really hard at first and I was wondering how I was going to cope with it. I know the basics now and am able to try something first before I ask for help. Just go to remember to be careful where I put things and check the layer it’s on before I create something or it could get stuck there.
I also learnt that you should hold shift if you are going to move a picture saves it from going the wrong shape and being stretched. Next time I will remember to feather my images to make them look better when I add them to my real project.

          For my planning and construction I think I need to plan more effectively and not throw myself right into doing the main construction element without even planning and backing up my ideas with written work. For the next project is focus on time management it is very important  to be doing the write things at the right time in order to achieve te best grade in this I need to time and plan effectively.