~*Evaluation Question 6*~

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of  

                       constructing this product?

Photoshop was the programme that I used to create all of my magazine pages. There is obviously a lot of things that I don't know about it, but I knew that I could create a half-decent quality magazine using it, so that's why I decided to use this programme. I learnt how to use the programme a little better in my main task by looking through tutorials on Google and YouTube etc. and asking my Media teacher. I learnt how to a lot of new things such as text effects, and how to hide skin blemishes, scars and spots using the healing tool and the patch tool. I learnt new keyboard shortcuts as too, which saved me from constantly going through the drop down menus. This included things such as taking a step backwards and taking a step forwards. I knew how to do this on a Windows computer, but I'd never really needed to do it on a Mac before, so this is something that I learnt throughout this process.

Dafont.com is the website that I used to download the majority of the fonts on my computer. I find that the programmed fonts on an iMac to be very basic, so I went on Dafont and downloaded a load of fonts that I could possibly use for my magazine pages. However, when it actually came down to it, I actually used Arial Black for the majority of my fonts, so the website didn't come in that handy for me. However, I do think that it's a really great website and I will definitely use it again.

This a Canon EOS 400D camera to take all of the images for my magazine pages. Although I have several cameras laying about the house, this is the most professional one that we own, and it would produce the most 'professional looking' images. So, considering that my job was to create a conventional, professional looking magazine, so this was the camera I decided to use. When I was taking pictures though, because the camera is quite heavy it was quite annoying to take around everywhere, so if I was to do something like this again, I would perhaps use a different camera. I did manage to get some good quality images using it though, so maybe it was worth it.

I only used SoundCloud once for my third evaluation question. It's a good programme to use as you can share it to Blogger really easily. I can't imagine needing to use it very much if you were creating a magazine, but it came in quite useful for me, so I wouldn't completely knock it.

I used YouTube twice in my project as I had to use its services to host the videos that I had created using iMovie and a camcorder. It takes quite a long time to upload the videos, especially if you want to upload the video in quite high quality.

I used GIFmaker (gifmaker.me) to create GIFs to animate my blog and make it pop. It was really easy to use and the results were great.

Powtoon was a useful tool in terms of helping me to produce the work for my blog. I found it very complicated and confusing when I first used it but by the end of this course work stage, I  felt  that I’d mastered it.

I thought I was familiar with Flickr before this process since I had used it a couple of times but I probably wouldn't ever use it again, unless it was entirely necessary as it was so confusing and the site updated itself since I last used it. It was quite hard to understand and I couldn't really find my way around it very well. I also couldn’t find a way to share the pictures I had taken to blogger as I had used it to display my contents page shots, so I ended up screenshotting the page and upload that screen shot with the link to the pictures, so I probably wouldn't ever use it again unless I really needed to.


To conclude, what I’ve learnt from this process is that despite the fact that there are a lot of disadvantages to using technology and it can be very, very unreliable, I would have never been able to anything without it, and my magazines wouldn't even exist today without it.