Looking back at your preliminary task- how have you progressed?

At the start of the course, we had an preliminary task to create a magazine cover and contents of a school magazine that would be read by students. I used Microsoft Word 2010 to construct my cover after experimenting with Photoshop. When I experimented with Photoshop, I found the software extremely hard to use and was unsure on how to apply any effects. My skills over the course have improved considerably as I can now apply various effects using different tools to reach a professional standard, that my preliminary task did not meet. On the left is my preliminary task and final construction, evidently my preliminary task is missing key features like a price or barcode. There is also a lack of detail and any effects. It also has a lot of blank spaces as I did not use the space effectively, which I feel like I have with my final construction.

Cover

ContentsAgain, there is an evident improvement from my preliminary task to my final construction, showing my development of skills. In my preliminary task my contents is organised, but lacks the amount of text a contents page should have. There is no detail as I just used simple text boxes and did not use any alterations on the image, like I did on Photoshop. I displayed these skills by changing the hue and saturation of the image, in addition I cut out the image by using the pen tool. Also the image was just simply placed on the page, whereas on my contents I made the effect of polaroid pictures, and slightly tilting them to make the overall page not overly organised and simple. Improvements were made as I also only used one font and there is hardly any variation of text size on my preliminary task with no effects. However, using Photoshop I was able to ad drop shadow behind the text to make it stand out. I also had a variation of text fonts and sizes, contrasting neat, square like fonts with round and italic fonts.