Looking back at your preliminary task- what do you feel you have learnt from the progression from it to the full product?

I think that I have progressed a lot in terms of my magazine production skills. Looking back at my preliminary task front cover it lacks a lot of professional conventions and generally looks very unprofessional. One of the best things that I did was probably good use of props so it was clear what the magazine was about, and there was also a clear and bold masthead. The main negative points of my preliminary task are that there is a very small variety in fonts and colours and there is also a lack of any form of lure. Despite already having a decent knowledge of Photoshop and taking photos, as I hadn't done any research into professional magazines and lacked knowledge of all the conventions I didn't produce a very good front cover. Before starting to produce my full product I did a lot of research into professional documents and learned all of the conventions that they have so that I could incorporate them into my own magazine. From doing this research I was confident when starting to create my full products. Firstly when doing the photo shoot I took a lot more photos than I did for the prelim task as if don't have enough when producing the magazine pages later on in the process it can be very annoying and I may of even had to do another photo shoot. The next thing that I learnt about the photo shoot is that it is important to plan a good amount of shots you want to take before you actually do the photo shoot so that you can make the most of the time that you have during the actual shoot. I also decided to make plans for the pages so that I had an idea of what to do when starting to make them. Whilst creating the full products I learnt a lot of new skills in Photoshop which allowed me to create better looking pages. These include how to add special effects like flames/smoke and flares to make certain parts of the page stand out more. I also learnt how to  use the alignment tools so that the pages were easy to read and not messy. Overall I think that my final products are all a huge improvement over the preliminary task and am happy with the final pages.