Media Evaluation-Technologies

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

Throughout the AS Media course, I have discovered and used various types of technologies and web 2.0 apps and my skills have developed a lot and the technologies have enabled me to produce near professional designs and communicate them via the internet, things I hadn't done before. Some of the programs which I used where:

 
Adobe Photoshop: Photoshop was a big part of producing FM, and helped me a lot in my vision and how I wanted the magazine to look. Some of the tools on Photoshop which I used were; the magic wand tool to cut around an image perfectly, cutting out the background to post the photo onto another setting. The quick select tool made a quicker selection of the area I wanted to change. Another tool I used was the eraser. By using a soft eraser I could get subtle edges which was particularly useful around the model's hair.

I used the colour picker to perfectly match colours. For my cover photo I produced a tinted glow to the background using the gradient tool, which I could position anywhere on the background where I wanted the glow to be displayed and also I could decide how big the glow/tint was and/or what shade I wanted.

Advantages to Photoshop are:

• It's available at college
• Industry-standard editing photo software programme
• Includes a variety of tools which aren't too difficult to learn

Disadvantages:

• Can be slow at picking it up if your a first time user
• If you rasterize a piece of text without meaning to you can't recover it back, you have to redo the same text again.

 Flickr: Flickr is a web programme which allowed me to upload images onto their site and then annotate text on certain areas of the photo. Once I was able to make all my annotations on the image I then could upload them straight from flickr onto my blog. I had some problems with this however so I had to just include the hyperlink rather than the image. Free software isn't perfect and was incompatible with my PC.

Advantages:

• A free programme
• Allowed me to write annotations clearly
• Edit text whenever
• Upload the images easily from flickr onto my blog
• People looking at the image will be able to read the text easy and will be able to see what I am talking about on specific details

Disadvantages:

• You have to create a Yahoo account before setting up your own flickr account
• Can take time to get used to how to use the web programme

Blogger: Blogger is where I upload all my work from the planning, ideas and making of FM. It allows people to see my work and share their comments with me. It shows my coursework in a quick, tidy way and show my personality on my blog. I have a few other blogs so I knew how to use blogs and the certain things you would place on the blog. Blogger also allowed me to link other web pages onto the blog and present them as a slide show for example using Issuu and also sharing You Tube links. On Blogger you can post your posts under certain labels making it quicker and easier for other people to find what they're looking for, and also another way to keep the blog neat and tidy.
Although Blogger is a great resource, it isn't perfect. I had lots of problems with it when it classified my blog as spam. We tried to get it reinstated but failed to. This was totally out of my control and was really frustrating. These types of problems happen with free sites.

 Survey-Monkey: Survey-Monkey let me produce a questionnaire making questions about magazines to collect feedback from my target audience on what they look for in a magazine, what types of music they like and other questions which could potentially help me which making FM.  Using the site is straight forward and it uses basic skills to make the questionnaire. It greatly increased my chances of getting responses, compared to a paper survey because people enjoy the novelty and simplicity of it.

Dafont: Dafont is a website which offers different font types and designs  which can be downloaded onto your computer and used for free as long as you are not selling your work. I used Dafont to see the types of fonts I would want to use on my magazine and that I thought would appeal to my audience. The range is huge and much better than the options on Photoshop.

 Issuu: Issuue is a web app which allowed me to upload PDF files from a word document onto their site and produce it into a internet slide show, making it easy to read and let me flick through the slides on the programme like a book. It made my blog more tidy, gave it a more professional look and showed more of my technical skills.