7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

As You can see, a key element that I have learnt about over the media coursework, is how to take better photos. The preliminary task's images were taken with the background and lighting not being thought about to the same extent as the actual project. Another thing that I have learned through producing both products is that planning the product with immense detail is incredibly important, as in the preliminary project, there was little planning and we just hoped that the image we had taken would work with the theme of the magazine, however with the real project, I had always planned for the front cover to be an extreme close up and knew that this was the image that I wanted. I also learned that time management is a major element to creating a magazine as during the preliminary project, I was vague with deadlines and other such planning, so with my real project, I planned in exact detail when things would be done by. Through using calendars on Microsoft Outlook and my iPhone, I was able to stick the deadlines better.

Another thing that I have learnt to do over the process of production is the attention to detail when creating the product in InDesign. As you can see, the contents page of my preliminary project is shabby and does not keep within the margins of the columns, that of which are different sizes. This issue was exasperated by the use of so many boxes, a mistake that I learned not to do in my final project as you can visibly see with the lack of boxes. To improve this in my final project, I also learned to use the ruler tool on InDesign so that I could line everything up the way I wanted and keep everything in line.