What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this project?

Technologies UsedDuring this project I have used many different technologies. Some I have used to construct my magazine, and others I have used to enhance my evaluation and to record my progress throughout this project. The main pieces of software I have used are:-Wordpress-QuarkXpress9-Photoshop-Prezi-Slideshare-Flickr

I have never used most of these technologies before, so I have learnt something about each of them.

WordpressWordpress is a blogging site which I have been using to show my progress throughout this magazine project. It allows you to create individual posts for what you want to talk about, helping everything to look neat and organised.

I have never used a blogging site before, so I have learnt a lot from using one. You can give it your own theme so that it matches the content, e.g. the theme for my blog is a camera to represent taking pictures for my magazine. It also allows you to embed things you have made using other software, such as Prezi presentations and pictures annotated on Flickr. Wordpress is also very handy as it allows you to save drafts and edit already published posts if you feel that you need to improve on them later.

QuarkXpress9This is the main software that I used. I used this to construct my magazine and give it a magazine format. It was a fairly simple software to use but it helped to make my magazine look very professional.

This software helped me learn about aligning text. This is one of the features that helped to make the text on my front cover look similar to real magazines, as I could spread each character in a coverline further apart or push them closer together in order to take up more room or less room, depending on what effect I wanted the coverline to have.

The use of textboxes also helped me to easily format my magazine, and to easily rearrange things if I needed to. I also used the shadowing effect that the software offered on the main coverline to make the text lift off the page slightly and catch the readers eye.

PhotoshopI used Photoshop to edit the images I took and to make them look more suitable to be used in a magazine. Out of all the software I have used, I learnt the most about this one as there are so many different tools to use.

For my front cover image I used the brightness/contrast tool to brighten up the previously dim photo, as the picture on the front cover needed to be bright and eye-catching. I also learnt how to use a vibrant tool, that I used to bring out the purple colours on the girls scarf.

Photoshop was also very useful for cropping pictures down to the main feature, and getting rid of any excess background that wasn’t necessary to keep.

Another main feature that I learnt how to use was the blur tool. On the front cover image, I blurred out the background around the girl so that she stood out more and the background didn’t look too sharp and divert away from the text.

This is the front cover image before and after I used these tools on Photoshop.

PreziPrezi allows you to present your work in a more interesting way than just writing it out in long paragraphs. It helps you to create an interactive slideshow with different animations and designs.

I found it very useful to use when talking about who my target audience are in my evaluation. I wrote in the text I wanted, placed it in the desired place and then learnt how to create a path for the order I wanted the text to show up on screen.

It just makes the information flow and follow on from each other in a way that a normal slideshow can’t do.

This is a Prezi presentation that I have created. The reader can press the arrows at the bottom to go back and forth between the chunks of text in the order that I have created.

SlideshareSlideshare has been handy for getting presentations that I have made onto my blog, as they can be embedded into a blog post. An example of this would be this presentation I have made, where I have made the presentation on PowerPoint, uploaded it to Slideshare, then embedded it into a blog post.

Similar to Prezi, it just makes the information more interactive, rather than just reading it off of a screen.

This is an example of a presentation I created and uploaded to Slideshare.

FlickrThe final piece of software that I have used is Flickr. I found this very handy to use when I needed to explain the features in my magazine.

It allowed me to upload my magazine pages, click on the parts of the magazine that I wanted to annotate and write annotations that would appear when you hover over that part of the magazine.

This is my contents page that I uploaded to Flickr and annotated. I then embedded it into my blog.