23/12/17

Aims:

• Work on purchase page [Not in initial plan]

Reflection:

Despite it being close to Christmas, I decided to work on my purchase page and created a solid draft for it. I have put the basic layout in place and I now have an idea of how my magazine will look. I also quickly through together an alternate front cover that I will likely not use in my final product. This was simply to represent what I wanted for now. 

Purchase Page First Draft

For this page, I drafted up this as one of my separate pages for my magazine:

This page follows the layout that I had envisioned though I have not yet put in the subscription option and I will work on this soon. The text looks full and the purchase button adds a professional vibe to this image. The three example previous issues are weak and they were something I crafted in a short space of time - they will be replaced. This page works well with the other pages of the website as it shares. This page still looks unfinished but it is a start and I will continue working on it. Once I have the final draft for the front cover, I will ensure that I add that to this page. 

21/12/17

Aims:

• Work on first drafts [Completed already]
• Check over blog

Reflection:

As I have completed my first drafts and the Christmas holidays begin tomorrow, I have decided that I would spend today checking over the work I have done thus far and making any changes needed. I have made minor changes to some presentations on Prezi such as my costume inspiration Prezi and my EverNote pose evaluation. These were slight changes to improve the way that they read and to make sure that my ideas were expressed more clearly and concisely. I have not changed what I had decided on and the ideas I was trying to express remain the same.

20/12/17

Aims:

• Receive first draft feedback [Not in initial plan]

Reflection:

After college, I enlisted my aunt again to give feedback and arranged the feedback I was given into a neat graph. This tells me what I can consider when I am making my next set of drafts. 

Audience Feedback: First Drafts

Once more, I sought out feedback on my first drafts to see if what I was doing was acceptable and to receive constructive criticism. The feedback I received was mostly positive and this showed me that my product would work well and would be received well by my target audience. However, I did receive a fair bit o negative feedback but it was constructive and shows me what I can change to be better.

Once again, this feedback comes from a person that I would expect my magaizne to appeal to. The subject is my aunt who is recently (in the past two years) married. She is 27 and she is a rich woman belonging to the upper middle class. She has told me that she would have interest in a magazine like the one I am making thus she is a member of my primary target audience.


Transcript:

- Okay, so here's the first draft of my front cover. What do you think? 
- The image here is beautiful. I love the way that her head is put above the masthead and I know this is a small thing to pick out but I like how the masthead can still be partially seen through the veil. The use of the expression and pose here is lovely too. 
I won't make proper comment on the layout until you've written up your sell lines. 
- Here's the first draft on my contents page. What do you think of that? 
- The image of the rings is particularly stunning. I like the way the layout looks. Again, I think I need to see a product with the write up before I can make a proper comment. Same goes for the article - though, the images you have are gorgeous, it's clear that you still need time to develop them.
- And here's the first draft of the billboard. 
- As for the billboard, this is an AMAZING start. The image is beautiful and the expression is eye-grabbing and romantic. The only critique I can give is that you need more additional information. You need the website URL or something, whatever it was that was in your original design. 
- Aaand the website?
- To be totally honest, this layout is a little boring. It needs more added to make it work properly because at the moment it just looks bland. You also can't reuse that image (EN: this was referring to one of the four images at the top of the page where I'd zoomed in on the bouquet). You need to take a different image of the bouquet.  
- Okay, thank you.

As I received a lot of feedback here, I once again decided to sort the negative from the positive by making an info-graphic with two different tables. This was once again something to refer back to later.

19/12/17

Aims:

• Work on first drafts

Reflection:

I have made significant progress on my website and posted a video draft. I made some tweaks to the upper half of the page, including adding captions. However, my main focus was adding in articles on the lower section. I do not have images yet and so I have used one image of mine repeatedly - an image of a beach from my holiday. I feel that this would tie in with a honeymoon themed article. 

Website First Draft

Using WIX, I have created the first draft of my website:



This layout  is very simple and there is lots that I wanted to change still. I still need to collect images to fill the spaces. The image used for the other articles is an image I took while abroad of a sandy beach. I thought that it would work well as a honeymoon image. I also need to format the text more. I do not expect this product to receive totally positive feedback as I know that it currently requires a lot of work but I have solid ideas and I know what I want from this product and how to achieve it over time.
I think that I have made a decent start and hard work will ensure I get what I want from this article.

18/12/17

Aims:

• Work on first drafts

Reflection:

I began working on my website today and have made my first few changes to the template to express my initial ideas. I will continue this work tomorrow. The changes I have made today revolve around the user half of the page and putting my own images into the the four block spaces. I have also changed the masthead and began editing the colors of the page. This has already changed a lot for me and I feel that my page already looks more relevant to my genre and product. 

15/12/17

Aims:

• Work on first drafts

Reflection:

I have completed my first draft for my billboard. I have made great progress here and I could not be happier with what I have produced for a first draft. I have heard back about the images and organized my files for my additional images and will be receiving/emailing them in the days to come. 

Billboard 1st Draft

This is my initial billboard draft.

This is the best draft that I feel I have produced so far. The image here is very romantic and very visually interesting. This layout is simple but it works and it is very beautiful. I will work out the layout for the additional information when I construct my next draft and I will also be playing around with the colour and potentially raising the saturation. In editing the image, I did overlay a filter to bring out the pinks and purples of the image but I think that they would be brought out more in a more saturated version of the image.
I am very proud of this first draft and I will continue working until my product is ideal. 

14/12/17

Aims:

• Work on first drafts

Reflection:

I have worked on my billboard draft today. Once more, I spent a lot of time looking for the best image and experimenting to decide which would work best but I have made a decision. I will take my work home with me tomorrow so that I can add in the other small details such as the masthead and the logo and then I can post the first draft and begin work on my website.

12/12/17

Aims:

• Work on first drafts

Reflection:

I produced the first draft for my article today. I am happy with how it looks and I will receive feedback shortly. Some of the images are still missing and I will add these in shortly. I will need to email myself the files containing the images I took at my sisters wedding. I have also been in contact with my sister and two other brides about additional photos that they may be able to offer me. 

Article Page 1st Draft

Here is my initial draft for my contents page: 

This is currently very limited as I do not have all of the images that I would like to have. The images that I do have are beautiful and strong but they will need some editing to make them work together ideally. The image of the church may need to be brightened and the images of the couple may need to have their colouring adjusted so that they look similar. A filter could be applied over all of the images so that they all fit together. The text layout also looks very nice to me. I feel that I can write an article that fills that space easily. I will write it up in word so that it can be spellchecked as Photoshop does not have this feature. Then, I will pick out the best two quotes for the pull quotes. I will copy and paste it into these two boxes by the time I post my next draft.

I have made a good start with my article draft and I will continue to work on it.  

11/12/17

Aims:

• Work on first drafts

Reflection:

The layout for the article looks good and I am almost ready to post it after a few more tweaks. 

8/12/17

Aims:

• Work on first drafts

Reflection:

I began work on my article today. For the most part, I spent the day swapping in different images and choosing how to arrange them. I have decided which I will use and I will work on the rest of the layout on Monday. 

7/12/17

Aims:

• Work on first drafts

Reflection:

I quickly put together a contents page based upon the layout I already had from the storyboarding. I still need to get an image of a traditional suit, which I will be able to get shortly. However, I am happy with the layout. I will work on my article tomorrow. I am making quick progress. 

Contents Page 1st Draft

This is the initial draft that I've planned for my contents page. It follows the layout I planned in my flatplan. 

The images here work well as well. I still do not have the image that I wanted of the suit so I'll take this photo as soon as I can. I also haven't yet written up the content that will go in the contents list. I will write these up and get the image by the time I create the next draft. I also used a photo of myself in the editors note. I chose this image as it was taken on a Canon camera so therefore it is high quality. These images work well together so far and I feel that the way I have arranged and cropped them looks like it could be from a real layout. I need to edit the images more though and change the filters and change the colouring, lighting, contrast and such. I will play around with this till I feel that it looks better. 

I am proud of my initial draft and I feel that it looks particularly professional and strong and, with more editing, I will have a solid product. 

5/12/17

Aims:

• Work on first drafts

Reflection:

I have created my first draft for my front cover quickly due to constant work. I want to just get as much of the layout in as possible for my first drafts so that I can have an idea of how the pages will look. Once I have done this, I will look for feedback and evaluate whether or not what I am doing will work. If I conclude that these pages look good and will appeal then I can continue editing the images and doing further work. 

Front Cover 1st Draft

I have created my first draft for my front cover. This is it: 

In creating this, I used the image that I felt was the strongest. Though the facial expression was less invitational and more super-smiler, I still feel that it is a hybrid of both as Toni is giving invitational vibes. I have edited them image so that the masthead went behind her head. I did this by using the magnetic lasso tool to cut out the head and then move it to an upper layer. One detail that I added was the masthead was partially visible through the veil as I felt that this showed I was confident with my editing skills. I created this effect by using a brush with a lowered opacity. I placed the text that I had planned to around my model - though I have not yet put in the text. Something I will need to consider when drafting up my next draft is whether the fonts will need to be made smaller. The text fits well over my image and is still readable. This was something I worried about as I was not sure if I'd have to edit the image or change the colour of the text to make it stand out more. 

Overall, I like this draft and I feel that I have made a good start with my construction. 

4/12/17

Aims:

• Work on first drafts

Reflection:

I chose the strongest image for my front cover and began working on it. Progress with this has moved very fast and I was able to create a solid start. I have not begun editing the image much but I have began putting the text in. I will work on this again tomorrow however my first draft may just be me putting the layout into place and further editing may come into later drafts. 

1/12/17

Aims:

• Upload images to computer
• Evaluate images

Reflection:

I uploaded my images onto my college computer and onto a memory stick so I could work on them at home. This transfer took up a lot of time so I did the evaluation at home. I made gifs of the images on photoshop and compressed the file size by using the Save For Web feature. This meant that upload time onto blogger was faster and that my work didn't look cluttered. I evaluated the images for their strengths and gave brief descriptions of them. I also have ideas of which images I will use for my product and which are not strong enough. 

Photoshoot Evaluation

The first photos I took were images of the rings. I took the images on multiple different surfaces and with different lightings. I also moved them around a couple times. This ensured that I got a range of images that I could later look back on and choose the best from. These are those images: 

These are the images were took in Houghton Park. Though we were limited. We were able to get images from different angles and with different shots. I am happy with this as it means I have some diversity in my images. 

This is where I got the majority of my images. I am unhappy with the pole and the sign in the background however it does not exist in every image and I feel that I am competent in my Photoshop skills to remove this and to ensure that it does not detract from any of my images. In this part of the shoot, I took images in different poses, with different shots, and from different angles. Toni worked well here and truly understood the sort of shots I wanted from her and how I needed her to pose. This tells me that my organization was strong. 

These were the images of the church I got. This ensures that I will have photos of different things and that not all of the images will be of the couple. This ensures that I am demonstrating a range of content and creating visual interest. 

The final images I took were of flowers. These were the only two I could get but I am happy with them and feel that they will add color to my pages and make them more visually exciting. 

Calendar For December

Once I have my photos taken, I will begin construction. It is my goal for this month to produce first drafts for my front cover, contents page, article, billboard, and website before the Christmas Holidays.