Skills Development

I feel I have learnt a great deal since the preliminary task, one of the main areas I have learnt new skills in is Photoshop. I have learnt of the many different ways Photoshop can be used to improve pictures, achieve a good layout, establishing a house style and use different fonts to achieve a professional looking product. My time management skills have been forced to improve also with bad management early on leading to little free time. Looking at real magazines has also helped me further my skills as I learnt the conventions and the traditional techniques to make it look better. Another section I learnt a lot about was design. I learnt how you need certain models and composition elements to make your magazine appeal to your target audience. I also learnt that creating a professional product requires planning and drafts as opposed to starting from scratch. I found the best way to find out what my target audience is and what they want is by asking them(with questionnaires)and that the answers are more important than what you think would look good in a magazine. Another part of my learning was how a slight error; stretched or blurred image, spelling errors or bad composition, can greatly affect how you view a product and how much it would effect whether people would read your magazine. I also learnt about the concept of a double page spread, how it needs separate text, have pictures, pull quotes and cutaways to seem interesting and make the reader want to read it.