Evaluation Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

As I've learned more about PhotoShop and DTP, I started to think of ways to make the text stand out more.  On my music magazine, you can see that I've used an opaque box to make the main sell line 'pop' out from the rest of the page.  It provides a more plain background for the text to prevent it from blending into the background.  It also helps to establish a colour scheme which in turn aids the following of a convention.  This example demonstrates how I've applied the skills I've learned about DTP and applied my new learned PhotoShop skills.

You can see that I started to look at the conventions of contents page layout during the preliminary task.  However, my draft contents page was very simple and bland, and I also didn't follow the invisible 'margins' around the page when placing different text boxes on the page.
  To create a more engaging layout, I identified different features of several magazines, focusing on two in particular.  This gave the page more elements and therefore made it more interesting to look at.  However, I made sure that the page didn't look too busy and unorganised by using margins to make things easier to follow.  In the creation of my contents page, I learned how to create a neatly structured layout, and how this balances the application of many elements onto the page.