Question #6What have you learnt about new

technologies and software from the process of creating your media

product?

When designing and producing the final product of my music magazine, I used various forms of technology and software to help me create it. These have helped me to make the actual magazine and to present things on my blog in various media rich ways

Apple Mac Computer

My whole blog and media product was created using an Apple Mac computer. The Mac was a huge part of the whole creation process, as it was a very high quality, top of the range computer which allowed me to easily access programs and software to make my blog and magazine successful. A few examples of the programs and websites used by the Mac is; Photoshop, Prezi, Survey Monkey, Blogger, Powtoon, Pinterest etc. Before this project I had never used a mac before and it took me a while to get used to the controls of it, however in the end I discovered that I prefer using them a lot more to regular computers due to how much faster and more efficient they are.

Blogger

In order to present all my research, planning final products etc. in one place, I decided to use blogger to place them all on a blog. I had never used blogger prior to this, therefore I had to get used to how to make posts and add images and embedded videos to it, but in the end I managed to navigate my way around the site with great ease. All my findings and products are displayed on this site in media rich ways, with the use of attachments and embedded codes. I am able to edit my posts, therefore whenever I learnt some new information or gained any more ideas, I went back and updates all my ideas and research.

Pinterest

Pinterest is an online website used to display multiple images all in one place. This was a new website to me when creating my blog; I had never used it before and was not really sure what it was. Once I learnt how to use it, I managed to create ‘mood boards’ on it of various images of music magazines and different outfits ideas in order to help with my target audience research. This allowed the images to all be shown together on one page neatly, as if they were ideas being pinned to a board.

Prezi

Prezi is a website used to make presentations slightly more interesting, as it uses a variety of themes and customization techniques and transitions in order to make the presentation more appealing to the viewers. When doing my research, planning and productions, I used Prezi on a number of occasions, as I feel it is a good alternative to Microsoft Powerpoint.

Animoto

Animoto is a website used to create 30 second long videos which act like presentations to display pictures and information. I however used a premium account when using animoto, as 30 seconds was not long enough to display as much information as I wanted, and I found it was a very good alternative to online presentations, as it allowed you to add special features (an example being music)

Powtoon

Powtoon is a website which allows you to create a presentation in the style of a video. It allows you to animate your ideas in a creative way and is my personal favourite of all the newly introduced programs/software/websites I've used during this whole process. It allowed me to put down all my ideas in a creative and cartoon like way, which makes it very appealing to the viewer.

Survey Monkey

Survey Monkey is an online website used to display surveys and questionnaires. I had never used this before however it did not take me long to create multiple surveys on it, before posting them to online social network sites (Twitter) in order to get results back to help me with my target audience research.

Adobe Photoshop

The main software I used during this whole process was Adobe Photoshop CS5. Photoshop was completely new to me at the start of this project, therefore I had a lot to learn. During the production of my final magazine pages, I learnt a lot about the different tools that photoshop has to offer, such as: how to use the eye dropper tool to pick up colour, how to use the lasso tool to select certain segments of your work, how to copy/duplicate layers with the Alt+Drag shortcut, how to use different brush sizes and strokes to draw freely on the page, how to use the ‘place’ tool to add photos, how to blend using the finger smudge tool, how to add text using the text box tool, how to rotate and scale images using the free transform tool, and many, many more.