Draft Improvement

This improvement has seen the removal of the once described 'tacky' yellow sticker (seen previously with the words 'FREE POSTER INSIDE' on it) and also a reformatting of the competition banner (previously seen at the top of the first draft as a bright yellow box with red contrasting writing. The general feedback I received on my front cover was that it looked like it was trying to appeal to a mainstream audience when in fact the genre of jazz itself could be seen as interests of a niche audience so the magazone would not need to try to impress in any special way. In my second draft (conveniently my final draft), I made lots of changes, to improve the overall appearance making references to prior feedback. these changes include; the competition banner which is now featured in a thematically matching torn up piece of off-white paper. Some critisism I received after my first draft also was that the front cover and contents page do not look like they come from the same magazine. This is why I added in the new matching theme of old style paper and polaroid photos from the contents page.

Not a great amount of change happened to my contents page. A mere change around of smaller decorative layers for example the red rubber confidential and top secret stamps. I created these myself using a font which I downloaded from dafont.com. An important part in this process for me has been the fonts. Without a good looking font, your work does not shine, it does not stand out and ultimately your audience will not buy it. Something I learned was how the font can speak volumes. The particular font I used largely throughout the magazine was Reprise Stamp. This font came standard with Photoshop Elements 5*. I also combined these standard fonts with ones I had downloaded to create a flowing, eye-pleasing product.

*All three main products were produced using Photoshop CS5 Extended Edition v.12.0.4

It is worth noting at this stage that a draft of the double page spread was not available due to a complete re-work. It was decided by myself that the standard of the double page spread I had produced was not anywhere near as good as the two other pages I had produced. This was down to a few reasons, the main two being that this initial double page spread was produced on publisher (final dps produced on Photoshop CS5) and I knew for a fact I had not worked very hard in the first instance with the dps and what I had learned for definite is that you cannot create a convincing magazine page without building up from a good foundation. So if an initial draft has no potential to expand, it will simply not go anywhere. So I decided to completely abandon this double page spread as I didn't believe I could expend on the ideas already present on the page without coming across the previous problem of the three separate products looking like they are from separate magazines. So I quickly got working on a new dps and came up with the finishing product seen above.