Amie Page

Hardware

The physical products I used to help me build my magazine for example keyboards, computers and

cameras.

Apple Mac

The main piece of hardware I have used during the process of building my magazine has been an Apple Mac. The Apple Mac I have been using has been the Mac OS X with a 2 GHz Intel core processor and an 8GB memory. The Apple Mac is an essential piece of equipment to getting a professional finish as it contains much of the software that wouldn't’t be accessible on a windows computer, such as Photoshop.

Key Board and Mouse

The Keyboard and mouse have been staple products to help me control the Apple Mac computers, as they have been my tools to help me select the various different programmes and tools I have wanted to use on software such as Microsoft word, power-point and photo-shop. The mouse is the model A1152 and the keyboard model number was the A1242, this are quite advanced models and allow me to easily use and quickly make amendments to my magazine cover, contents and article.

Camera- Nikon Coolpix (L310)

Nikon Coolpix L310 is a bridge camera some of the key features are:-14 megapixel CCD sensor-Sensor shift vibration reduction (VR)-3 inch LCD screen-Sports continuous mode-720p HD video recording-ISO 80 - 6400-1cm minimum focusing distance- 21 x optical zoom -Smart Portrait System

This camera and these key feature really helped me to get a really good quality photograph for my cover, contents and article. Most of the photos were extremely well focused and good quality, especially if I needed to use the zoom feature. Also on the head shots of Erin the facial recognition feature would pick out the face and focus on this, ensuring I got a very good image most times.

Phone (Photographs)

This is an Apple IPhone 4s and the phone that helped me to take a live photo of Luke Friend to put in my contents page, the camera has quite good quality in good lighting and when not zoomed in too much, so overall for a camera I wouldn’t expect to capture a great photo I was quite pleased as this live shot really helped me to capture the more professional look of other magazines, whose contents pages are full of live images from concerts, festivals and gigs.

SD Memory Card Stick

This is a SD Card memory stick or adapter and can transfer images from cameras and onto computers. I didn’t use this during the actual creation of my magazine, I used it during the creation of my school magazine which really helped me discover the different ways of transporting photographs to my computer, so it did help me learn about various different technologies.

Software

All the programmes used to help create my music magazine and what I have learnt from them.

Adobe PhotoshopAdobe Photoshop is a software programme that helps to create ‘creative workflows of all types’, so that anyone can easily make more creative documents that can’t be done on a word or power-point document. Photoshop has helped me develop all three sections of my magazine making them look more professional with their extensive range of tools. I have learnt many things about this software such as how to edit images in a natural way to slightly change the lighting, touch up the appearance of a person, how to edit text adding different effects and how to arrange a document in an ordered way using rulers.

First in photoshop I learnt how to create a new document, in different sizes and layouts (this was particularly important for the layout of the article). Then using the text tool, I learnt how put a text onto this new document.

This text could have various different font types and we downloaded some ourselves, which were added to our text library. This text could also be edited more as we added drop shadows, stroke, inner shadow, outer/ inner glow, colour overlay etc.

Another feature I learnt to do from photoshop was to edit images and increase their brightness and contrast, intensifying the features on my artists face. I also learnt to take aspects of an image and place them on another, so my image wasn’t fully big enough to fit A4. So I cut out parts of the background and placed them above Erin creating room for my masthead, so that it would cover her face.

Another feature of Photoshop that really helped me create a professional look to my magazine was creating a blur on the background and lesser features of the images in my cover, contents and article. This image to the right shows the different when using the blur compared to not using it. It shows how I can smooth out and enhance the photograph without making it look really edited.

No Blur Blur

WordPress

WordPress is the company we used to set up our blogs to enable us to document all of our work, keeping an online diary. It has helped me to keep my work organised and explore various different creative methods of displaying my work.

The first view of my blog

My Various pages

My Music Magazine Page

My blog has various different features that help me and others to find all my work quickly and easily. Such features are pages which have a link strait to my work so for example I have shown here that there is a link strait to my finished music magazine, showing the final versions of my contents, cover and article pages.

WordPress also allows me to keep up to date and reorder (if needed) my blog posts. It keeps an online record of every blog post and draft I have created enabling me to edit and improve anything I need to extremely quickly. I also can add a new post by clicking on just one button which helped me to document all the various ideas and final product of my magazine quickly and efficiently.

WordPress also have vast amounts of different themes for me to choose from in order to personalise my blog. However these are also important as they help me to display my blog in a structure that I want, so if I wanted my blog to mainly focus on photographs they have themes to suit this. However I wanted my blog to be easily readable with a focus more on a scroll down structure, to help it flow.

PowerPointPower point has helped me to display and set out my various evaluation questions in more interesting way, so instead of having a blog post I can organise my ideas into different sections, with various amount of pictures and screen shots. I also think that power-point helped me to display my work with more flow and design as there are many different styles to choose from.

Power-point also allows me to edit images and add text boxes and shapes helping me to get my point across when explaining about my magazine.

SlideShare

Slide share is a virtual storage unit of many different power-points and documents that can either be viewed by the public or set to private. However I used slide share to upload my power points to my blog using the embedded code provided. Slide share not only helps other people with questions they might have but allows them to see it in a visual way.

Microsoft WordMicrosoft is a piece of software that help enables people to create ‘beautiful and engaging documents’. I used this programme not to make a document seen by others but to plan the writing of my article before I put it into InDesign. I was able to plan my article sufficiently, ensuring all spelling and grammar was correct, this gave me a much more professional sounding article.

Planned Word Document Article

Word also enabled me to organise my article into columns so I could get a sense of what my article would look and feel like.

InDesign

Was a programme I used to arrange the text on my article, it had a lot more options text wise than Photoshop and really let me ensure my article looked neat and professional.

My article in InDesign.

These two tools were probably the most used tools in InDesign. They are the mouse tool (to move around my text boxes) and the text tool (to add or edit text to fit the theme of the article. These helped me to have the text placed in the various columns, also another feature that I found really useful was the over flow, so if there was too much text in one column it would naturally start typing into the next column. This let me concentrate on the presentation of the article.

This stroke tool was a really useful tool and again a tool I used a lot to make the text stand out compared to the page, giving the article a much more professional look.

I also learnt how to use the colour and effects which played a big part to my article text and graphics as for example I put a very faint glow around the headline ‘Erin Laidlaw’ to just make it stand out rom the page slightly.

Another aspect that really helped me advance my magazine was the character styles, there are many different character styles and more than photo-shop so you can get a better range and therefore more tailored to your genre of magazine.

YouTube YouTube was a piece of software I used to add videos linking to my indie-folk theme, it helped me get a sense of style, music type, attitudes of artists and settings they could normally play in. It also enabled me to take inspiration from videos such as mentioned in my previous evaluation and planning questions.