What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Everything that I have researched and made I have posted onto my blog. To use blogger I would log in and click on the ‘AS Media Studies blog. I then would click onto the orange button with a pencil on it to create a new blog post.

All my posts were on one page so that I could edit or delete the posts that needed altering.

BLOGGER

To upload a file onto my blog I had to convert the to a JPEG file, which turned the document into an image.

I would then click on the new post button on the blogger website and click on upload file/files.

To upload a video I copied and pasted the link of a song/video off YouTube and then the video would compose onto my blog.

Uploading files to your blog

To create my masthead I went on the website www.dafont.com to create the edgy font of writing that I wanted my front cover to have as it is representative of the alternative rock genre. .

DaFont

I also decided to use this website to create titles for my contents page and double page spread. I chose to do this because it stands out more on the page compared to the main body of text.

I had never used Photoshop before so the whole making of my magazine process I found difficult. First of all I had to chose the setting of how I wanted my page and I used the international A4 format. This meant that when I printed off my magazine front cover it was the normal A4 size.

I started to create my magazine by following music magazine conventions. First of all I took my images.

Photoshop

This is the blank document that I started off with.

To create my front cover I decreased the brightness of my image to make the text stand out more on the page. I used the crop tool and the magic wand tool to delete the white background away from the titles that I uploaded onto Photoshop. To add a stroke around my words and images I got to chose how think I wanted it to be and the colour. This was helpful because where my background image is quite dark I could add a think white stroke onto a word/title to make it stand out more. As you can see I have added a stroke onto my main feature story.

Using Photoshop- Front Cover

For the plug I placed a red circle on top of a white circle to keep the consistency of having a white stroke around the text. I had the verb ‘win’ foregrounded in capital letters and in yellow to make it stand out on the page. This would help attract my target audience as there was a chance to win festival tickets. Also it was a good choice to use yellow because I put the Leeds Reading logo onto my front cover which happened to be red and yellow.

The contents page I found the most difficult out of all three pages to create, this was because I didn’t know what to post on it. To overcome this I did further research into existing NME contents pages. On my contents page I uploaded another image of Lauryn as she was my main feature story so she had to take up the most room on the contents page as well. I followed the conventions of NME and made a column where all the main feature stories from the front cover were listed and had brief descriptions. I used the crop and the magic want tool to delete the white pace behind the titles.

Using Photoshop- Contents Page

To fill in the white space on the page I added my google mock-ups and my first draft of my front cover and resized them by using the scale button and holding down the control button on the keyboard.

For my double page spread I used the feature story which was about Lauryn. For my main body of text I created that on Microsoft Publisher to ensure that I had the conventions of columns. I chose the international A3 paper on Photoshop on settings so that when I print off my double page spread it actually looks like one. I followed conventions for my double page spread and cut around an image of Lauryn using the lasso tool. I created a giant ‘L’ to go underneath the main body of text using the scale tool and the crop and magic wand tool. I also made a stand first by getting the letter ‘L’ off dafont and adding it onto my main body of text once I added that onto my double page spread. I did this by saving my Photoshop document as a jpeg file and uploading it onto publisher to finally have created my double page spread.

Using Photoshop- Double Page Spread