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

During the process of constructing my magazine I have learnt a lot about different technologies, hardware and software based. When I first started to plan my magazine, I started by designing a collage magazine which was designed in Microsoft Publisher. I found that, although appropriate for the task in hand, it was hard to make the designed look professional enough to pass as a genuine magazine. The problem was that there was not much fine control over the elements of the page such as the text boxes and shapes, which meant that resizing and colouring were as far as I could go. I did however incorporate some transparency which helped to make the design look a little more professional.

For my main magazine, I moved on to two programs made by Adobe. The first was Adobe Photoshop Elements and the other was Adobe InDesign CS4. Adobe Photoshop Elements is a raster image editing product which is basically a simpler version of Adobe Photoshop, which is aimed at less professional users such as photographers. The program makes it much easy than Microsoft Publisher to create the design you want with much finer control over the different elements that make up the page. The program also has extensive photography editing tools which make it easy to manipulate images. I used these features to make some my original images black and white and to add a cross-processed effect to the main image on my double page spread. 

For the actual double page spread, I used Adobe InDesign CS4 which is a professional desktop publishing application which is generally used to create poster, flyers and magazines.  It basically a more advanced version of Microsoft Publisher (which is also a DTP application) with more focus on advanced layout techniques and effects. Over the course of creating my magazine I have learnt a lot about the programs that I've used.  I have learnt basic photo editing techniques, layout design, the use of effects (such as drop shadow) on elements, the use of opacity settings.  In using all these techniques I feel that I have built a professional and good looking front cover, contents page and double page article. I also learnt different photography techniques, which I needed for taking the pictures for my magazine.  Some of these techiniqes include framing with the rule of thirds, headroom and lead room.

The blogging element of this coursework was new to me when we first started as I had never attempted blogging before but after a while spent messing around with the different features I found it to be very similar to word processing, just found within the browser.  Through the course of creating my blog I learnt about such features as font formatting, hyperlinks, inserting images and basic blog management (editing and publishing posts).