Evaluation: Skills Development

Looking back from when I made my preliminary task, I feel I have made a lot of progress in the time it took to make my full product. I understand how great the need is to research existing products, and to do audience research and questions because I found out a lot of information about what conventions are popular in the industry and what readers prefer. This would boost the sales of my magazine if it included a lot of things people wanted to see. I feel I have used the technology and computer programmes with more confidence as I am improving on using different skills and features, and not needing to ask for help as much. I am able to just play around with different items and go back if need be without ruining anything and I know how to save the files as JPEGs as well as Photoshop files. I have more basic knowledge. I am also learning from other people what other things I can do and how I can experiment more with my products. I think it is very important to pay attention to other people’s magazines as they are all different and can provide a lot of ideas. The same applies to getting advice and opinions from people looking at my magazine, as the feedback tells me what looks good and what doesn’t work- allowing me to change it and make it look more realistic and suitable for the target audience. I also learnt a lot about needing to be attentive to detail as I thought that I had finished my magazine but it came to my attention that a lot of the text was incorrect, as I was missing apostrophes and very small bits of punctuation that I did not notice until pointed out. Even small items such as page numbers and dates made a huge difference when I added them at the end. The final checking of my product made a very big improvement as I knew that it was all correct and no longer a rough version. This has made me realise that next time I need to pay more attention to my journalism and writing skills as the interview featured in my magazine was very informal and chatty and it would be interesting to see how I coped with a very formal and serious style article. I think going outside my comfort zone would be a challenge for me in the future.