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

I have used many different technologies during this coursework, I have learnt how to use them and developed my skills in them. Here is a list of the different technologies that I used, how I used them and their advantages and disadvantages.

Adobe Photoshop:

I used Photoshop during the construction of my front cover, contents page, and article. Photoshop is a programme that allows you to digitally edit and create graphics. I had used photoshop briefly before this coursework, and had some experience using it, but throughout the construction I have developed my skills and learnt a few new things. I learnt about many tools, such as the polygonal lasso tool, blending options, the clone stamp tool and also the benefits of multi-layering.

This is a screen shot I took using the crop tool. I used this mostly when I copied fonts from the website Dafont.com

This is a screenshot I took using the blending options, I used these mainly for text, to make the text stand out against the background.

Digital Camera:

The camera that I used was the Canon EOS 550D, I used this camera to capture the images for my magazine. I used these pictures on the front cover, the contents page and the article. I tried to take as many pictures as I could in many different angles and positions to try and experiment and have a large choice of what pictures to include in my magazine. I took pictures of bands playing, and so experimented with how many people to include in the shot and what angle to take the pictures in.

Blogger:

Blogger is the website that I used to post all of my coursework onto the internet. Blogger was very easy to use, and a useful tool for completing my coursework. The advantages of using this, is that by posting all of my work on here, it allows me to access it from anywhere. I can also add pictures very easily, add to my work whenever I want, and it also made my coursework much more interesting to do. Writing an essay on Blogger was a lot more entertaining than simply writing it on paper, or typing it up and printing it out. It also allows all of my work to be in one place that I can organise, access easily, and compare quickly and easily. However, I found that using Blogger was quite limited in terms of design, and more formatting would allow me to make my blog more creative and to my own style.

Flickr:

Flickr is a website used to upload and share pictures, I used it to upload my pictures and link them to my posts on my blog, I also used it to analyse many magazine covers for my research. Analysing things on Flickr is very simple and effective, I can target a specific area on the image and write a caption, which allows me to analyse small parts of the image rather than the entire image and risk leaving out important details. It is much easier than writing an essay as it is very interactive.

Dafont.com:

Dafont is a website that shares many different fonts, it allowed me to copy fonts I thought were fitting to my magazine, and add them to my work. There are hundreds of fonts on there, and the fonts are much better than those provided on Photoshop. However, a disadvantage was that because I am using the college network I could not download and install the fonts, so any fonts I used had to be screen shots off the website. Making it very difficult to write longer sentences using any fonts on the website.