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

When creating my magazine, I used lots of different technology for the planning and designing. My magazine was designed and made on Photoshop. I really enjoyed using Photoshop as I haven’t ever used it before. I found it quite challenging getting used to the way it all worked, but I picked it up quite quickly, and managed to produce something I found quite impressive. I think that if I had more experience, I would have done a lot better, but once I had a basic design for my magazine, I went over it again and again, playing with different effects and changing the layout. Because of this, I found it was very time consuming. I enjoyed editing my main image before adding it to the magazine. I played about with the contrast, brightness and used tools to give an airbrushed looked finish. I never really considered using Photoshop in the past, but after getting used to the layers and different tools I found that it is an amazing piece of technology that can be used by professionals and armatures. As I had never used Photoshop before, when I finished my magazine, I felt extremely proud of what I had achieved, and wanted to show everyone.

I used Flickr to analyse and present some of my planning and evaluations. I had never used Flickr before either, so I had to make a new account and get used to the way it worked. I found that Flickr was quite simple to use, and with help from my friends, I picked it up very quickly. I found that Flickr was a really good website to use to display some of my work as I could upload my picture, then add a note, meaning that if someone was to look at my picture they could hover their mouse over certain parts of the picture and see different annotations.

I decided to use Blogger too showcase all of my final pieces. Blogger allows you to upload images, write text and customise my blog. Blogger is free and there is no word limit, so I could do as much annotating as I wanted. I found that when uploading pictures, I couldn’t lay them out very neatly. I feel that this made my blog look messy and not half as presentable as I could have had it. I had a lot of trouble trying to drag the pictures to where I wanted them to go. Also the spell check didn’t work for me either, meaning that I had to type up my text into word (so that I could correct any spelling mistakes) then copy and paste my text onto my blog. I found this quite annoying, but I would rather have done it this way than had lots of spelling mistakes, as it would have looked really unprofessional. But although this website could be improved, I can’t complain as it is free to sign up and is a good, clear way to present my work.