Skills development

My skills have developed greatly during the course of my project. In the preliminary task I was new to the software meaning I had to learn all Photoshop skills for the project. My college magazine was much more basic in terms for the images used and the font layouts. I am much more confident in using the software now; having learned many of the functions that it can perform. When first introduced to the project I needed help from experienced users compared to now where I feel my skills are at a good level. Over the course of the project I have really discovered the importance of audience research. My preliminary task was done without audience research so the extensive research for the main task definately helped my skills develop. This allowed me to see exactly what the audience would want. I spent much more time looking at and analysing existing magazines for the main task. From this is learned the conventions of music magazines developing my understanding from the beginning of the project. My developing skills were a reason that my original concept for the contents page was not chosen to become the final design. Having completed much more research I learned that my original concept wasn’t what my results displayed that the target audience would want. Due to my advancing skills I managed think of a better idea that would be an improvement on the previous concept. Once confident with the technologies, I was able to play around with potential designs quickly, keeping good changes and deleting the bad ones. Once my products were finished I got the opinions of a small sample of people in the target audience to see how they would respond to it. This was a development from the preliminary task where I did not do such extensive research. Once finishing all my products I performed spell checks to ensure that there were no mistakes anywhere on my finished products. I spent a lot of time making sure the text was laid out nicely. In the preliminary task hyphens were used to continue words onto the following line if they could not fit onto one line. For my main task I made sure this did not happen keeping all words in full on each line. This developed my understanding of how the text should be presented following feedback from a college tutor. If I were to redo the product I think I would be able to come up with an even better design now that my skills for Photoshop have developed considerably. I would be much more willing to take risks since I know the software well enough to sort out any things that did not go as planned. I would also change to contrast of certain images to make sure that they really give off the exact connotations that I intend.