looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progresion from it to the full product?

Perliminary task brief:

"using DTP and an image manipulation program, produce the front page of a
new school/college magazine, featuring a photograph of a student in medium close-up plus some appropriately laid-out text and a masthead. Additionally candidates must produce a mock-up of the layout of the contents page to demonstrate their grasp of DTP.”

The Main Task

The front page, contents and double page spread of a new music magazine.
All images and text used must be original, produced by the candidate(s), minimum of four images per candidate. To be produced individually.


As you can observe from the two briefs the main task is a lot less specific, this gave me the chance to be alot more creative in my ideas. During the entire process i have learnt many things below is a list:


Research was extremely different between the perliminary task and the main task. The perliminary task involved minimal if any research, so the only thing i did look at was a few existing student magazines and thats as far as it went. But for the main task i looked in to shared features of similar magazines, publishers, forms and conventions and even into adorno's theory. All of these helped me gain the knowledge needed to create my final peice.

I also went about planning the two pieces differently, for the preliminary task i did no planning at all - it was all just trial and error until i found a piece i was happy wit hh. However with the main task i had already researched forms and conventions and shared features i then went onto create several different layout templates this meant when creating my final piece i had an idea of what i wanted to do, and by doing this i managed to save time and created a magazine appealing to the correct audience.

Once i had finished the planning and researching the next step was taking the photographs needed for the final pieces, for the perliminary task i speant one hour maximum (one lesson) just wondering around college with a camera taking photos of the college and a few of my friends. There were no real logistical arrangements or planning behind it, this was my first mistake. This was because when i came to use my photos i realised id got a very small amount of photos that could be used. this created limits to what i could do with the perliminary task. so for the main task i did the complete opposite to this i planned when where and who were going to be in my photos, and had several different shoots planned this way i new that i would have more images to choose from meaning i could be more creative when producing my final piece.

When it came to creating my magazine the skills i learnt in the perliminary task really helped me, although my knowledge wasn't great i still had a sufficient amount, and the more i used certain software the more i learnt.

Overall i feel that i have learnt a great deal in the progression from the perliminary task to the main task both in my knowledge of media and in my software skills.