Evaluation by Ellie King

 I think we worked well as a team and all decided on the idea of putting together a magazine to advertise things to do in the area. We decided to call our magazine ‘Around You.’  We felt that this was an original and catchy title and encapsulated what the magazine was about. This project allowed each of the group to work on subjects that really interested them and so this enabled me to work on music and a sports page. This left Will and Tanya to work on pages that interested them. We had some arguments, in particular our ideas on the lay out, typeface, colours etc, however we eventually reached a compromise and decided on how we would do things. I think each member of my group are quite strong characters and so we each had a tendency to want the work completed our own way.  Initially I was unsure of working in a group, however I now think that it was good experience for me and I would definitely consider group work in the future. It was also good preparation for the working in a real workplace as it is common to have to work in a team.

I was able to meet the deadlines and I did this by working in some of my study periods and occasionally at home.  I was able to spend time working on the magazine in my graphics lessons and found that this extra work and getting my head down enabled me to keep to the time constraints.

My time management was really good as we devised a production schedule at the start and I found it helpful to keep referring back to this. A few full days were spent working on getting my sports page up to scratch. I also spent the occasional lunchtime and graphics lessons my media work. And at home I went through some of my football and rugby programmes looking for ideas for my sports page.

My organisational skills are not very good as I have loads of unneeded and unnamed pictures of rugby and football players in my folder.  It takes a long time to find my media folder which only has two pieces of work in and my graphics folder is in my media folder.  I need to learn from this experience and try to organise myself better and make sure that I save things to the correct folders and delete things that are not needed.  I am good at communicating with people and getting my point across however as I have a tendency to forget myself and wear my headphones during every lesson.  I have my music pretty loud and I don’t often hear Tanya and Will when they are talking to me.  They quite often have to tap me on the shoulder to get my attention.

I think our what’s on guide is fair in comparison to the other guides on the market and it is obvious that novices have created our magazine. Commercially made magazines on the shelves of our newsagents, are made by people that have attended university and who have had years of experience in this field so the quality of their work is a very high standard and the making of their magazine appears effortless. I think as a group we can all admit to having problems with filling the pages with text and images and lost heart when gaps appeared. Having patience to spend time rearranging and experimenting with layout was a must and something that we all lacked at times.  We tried to include a wide variety of articles and include something for everyone and has got a lot of information crammed in without being too cramped. I actually think it is better than your other ‘what’s on’ guides, as ours has a sports events page and the others don’t tend to have one.  This is more likely to get more people picking it up to read it as it has a bigger target audience e.g. men who typically like sport.  If we were to print out our magazine then we would have to use good quality, glossy paper as is typical of other magazines.

The original proposal was to make a magazine, which brought all of our own ideas and interests together. As a group we have very different interests and so the pages in our magazine are full of very different events and information. Like in my music page I put lots of different types of music in to try and please everybody.

We created our own spin on a what’s on guide. We followed the basic ideas of a what’s on guide and tried also to follow the conventions of this type of magazine in particular layout in columns, size of font, headings etc.  There isn’t a lot of color in usual ‘what’s on’ guides and we have put a lot of pastel colours on the background of ours to make it more pleasing to the eye. And as I said before, usual what’s on guides don’t have a sports page, so that’s another bit of originality for ours.

We used Photoshop to make our magazine and this is the software that would be used in making a magazine on a commercial level.  We didn’t use the filters , as they were unnecessary for our magazine. We used a layout/grid that we uploaded on to Photoshop and this ensured that we all followed the same plan. We used the fill for the backgrounds and lowered the opacity.  We researched the web for copyright- free images and also used some of our own.  We didn’t use any unnecessary techniques.

As we are using blogger, there is no paper being used and at a very low cost so it is ethical as well as being eco-friendly. We have used very small text size too so much less ink is used.  All of the requirements are legal.

We didn’t have any missing items as we are using Photoshop and blogger.  We have had the occasional problem with illness within our team and this has highlighted the fact that we did not always save documents where others could find them in our absence. The only problem that we could of come close to getting with missing items is no Internet connection and work not being saved in the correct place or not saved at all.