Charlotte Hawthorn: September 2009

Evaluation
For my front cover of my magazine, I used a programme that I am semi familiar with. In my previous years of doing media studies I have used the programme Photoshop however have never really got the hang of it. Recently I have had to knuckle down and really try and understand it. I think I did quite well eventually but I am still learning how to use it correctly. Also, I used a programme I have never seen, used or even heard or called Quark. I found this very useful and was able to use it correctly within minutes and find it a lot easier to use than Photoshop. This is only because it seems to be a lot more simple and logical.
Secondly, if I could go back a couple of weeks and re do what I did, I wouldn’t have spent endless time doing useless things such as making my main cover girl more tanned, more pretty, less freckles. I would have simple left it how it was because it isn’t as important as getting the actual cover done and I got behind. This meant I had to use my spare time and lunchtimes and after school. However if in the first place I put it all on and in the right place and then later on in the process had more time I could have done it when I’d finished and not wasted any of my time and done it all in the lessons.
I would say it was most definitely a challenge to complete a real looking front cover and a contents page in a matter of weeks. Therefore I realised I needed to work faster and spent more time doing what really matters instead of just fixing the hair and make up. I also found it very challenging to take all of the pictures I needed myself, and in school because I don’t have a camera to use at home. Therefore I think I did particularly well to have finished with most of the images I wanted correctly done.
There were some images I just simply couldn’t do, such as “The football team”, and when I was in a school with 1500 girls and not as many boys I found it rather difficult. Also I can be a very shy person at times and would have felt rather awkward and inadequate asking them. Plus I didn’t have football kits for them to wear!
I found it rather difficult to make a school magazine, partly because there are very few school magazines out there, there were plenty of magazines such as music magazines, clothes magazines, fashion magazines but there were hardly any school magazines that I could get ideas from for my layout.
I am looking forward to doing my next piece of work on Photoshop because over the past few weeks I feel I have become more familiar and more confident using the programme, although it may seem a logical programme to use I found it very difficult at times because parts of it were so complex, like all of the unnecessary layers for example, I could never figure out which layer I was on or how to change or move things once I had started. On the very new programme Quark I found it difficult for the first ten minutes and by the end of the lesson I knew exactly what I was doing and was able to finish my contents page very quickly instead of spending endless lessons and spare time on working out how to use it.
Unfortunately when I had nearly finished my contents page I accidentally didn’t save it properly and had to re-start it again which I was understandably devastated about, however I just got on with it and made a new contents page the lesson after however it wasn’t as good because I couldn’t remember exactly what I had done. So next time I have to use Photoshop or Quark I will take into consideration that I need to save it properly and as I go along in case the same disaster happens again, but worse. Luckily I wasn’t very near the end and still had a few lessons to finish my contents. Therefore next time I will remember to save as I go along and make sure I have it saved on a memory stick aswell as on my computer/laptop.