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

2. Compared to my preliminary task (my college
magazine) I believe that my music
magazine is much better and is a clear
example showing in what areas I have
improved. These areas of improvement
are mainly because of a much better
understanding of the software I used such
as Photoshop and InDesign in which at the
beginning was still very new to and was
perhaps, during the process of creating my
preliminary task, still experimenting with
what I could do. However now, after using
Photoshop a lot at home and exploring
some of the vast number of features on
there I have been able to become more
accustomed to it. Also with InDesign I have
been able to extend my experiments and
try out new things but implement them in
a better way in my final media products to
create an overall, much higher quality
magazine.

3. Research
Also, prior to creating my magazine I undertook quite a lot of research
into music magazines of this genre (indie/rock). This allowed me to
gain a greater depth of knowledge into the typical conventions of
these magazines and how they successfully used different features
to make their final products look as good as they do. Some of the
conventions I learnt were:
• Front cover: dominant and powerful image with the artist staring
straight into the camera, one or two main
coverlines, date/issue, masthead, footer, barcode and all of it
structured in the rule of thirds.
• Contents page: being separated into specific sections, page
numbers, images, magazine logo or name, date/issue
• Double page spread: one dominant image, headline
(pullquote), subheading, style of the article (written in Q&A/free
flow), page number, captions used underneath any additional
images

4. Other Improvements
• One key thing I have learnt throughout this process is
making sure the content throughout is consistent and
relates to each other and the genre. It’s important for
the article to be interesting for the reader to enjoy
it, and also for the other features outlined on the
contents page to be appealing. Another thing I have
learnt is not to overcrowd the magazine for example
like I may have not on my preliminary task front cover
on which I included far too many cover lines. With this I
was able to research and notice how fewer cover lines
looked much more effective and allowed the image to
stand out more and maintain the focus of the reader.

5. More improvements
• Another thing that has improved is the colour
scheme. When doing my preliminary task I
was very experimentive with the colour
scheme and often didn’t pick colours that
went well together or allowed it to look
sophisticated. Whereas for my music
magazine, I picked a very simple but effective
colour scheme of darker colours
(black, white, grey) to give my magazine more
of a professional feel to it.