My College Magazine Evaluation

1. The photography went particularly well. We managed to explore different camera angles and shots. However, some of the shots we had taken cut out of the arms on some people so if we were to use them I would have had to stretch them so the arms were touching the edges and they would become pixelated and the quality wouldn’t be good. It was also a bit difficult to cut around some of the pictures because it merged in with the background. For example I had a photo that had a leaf from the background merging in with the person that I wanted to cut out but it unable to take the leaf away.

2. I have had experience with Photoshop in the past. However, I learnt one more way that you can cut out the background but it kept deleting more than I wanted out of it or not taking as much and the photo always looked really unprofessional and if I was to use that tool it would take much longer to take out the background than I normally do. I want to improve on the quality of cutting out images and trying not to stretch them.

I have never used InDesign before so everything I had done was new to me and I learned quite a bit about using the basic tools. I learned how to set up a page suitable for a magazine, I also learned how to create text, insert images, crop and resize them, adding effects to my title and how to export it once I had finished. I picked up InDesign very easily and didn’t have any particular problems with it.

3. My overall design didn’t look as professional as I wanted it to look. The picture looked a little bit stretched because I needed it to fit the whole page. I think that we could of took some pictures of people working in the resource centre for the inside page to show that students here work hard to get good grades as well so that the pictures could also match some of my inside articles.

I tried to make sure that the magazine had house style. I used the same colours so that the magazine front and inside pages looked like they were from the same magazine.

4. I was mostly influenced my questionnaire that I produced and asked several students because it shown everything that I needed to know about my audience to create a magazine that suited them best and knew which people it would be aimed at.

As the questions were mostly open questions, it helped to gain more information from the students around college and took more from it.