I did all my first designs on a very basic online software called ‘Canva’ and although it was useful for designing my first drafts it had limitations when it came to advanced designing in terms of layouts and typography.

However my Media Studies teacher then introduced me to 3 different softwares that would be of use to me when I map and produce my second drafts and the final product: Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Illustrator CS6 and Adobe InDesign CS6. 

I was not at all familiar with these softwares and I wanted to familiarise myself with them before I started with the actual designing process. I started off by practicing on Photoshop with the help of some tutorials. Then I was able to move on to InDesign where I was able to use some templates to help designing the magazine more professionally.

Attached below are time-lapses, screenshots and documents of the basic layouts and designs I made to get a better handle on the software. 

[Some images in the above design were taken from Google Photos. Text used was taken from Pinterest.]

I noticed when designing the above design I need more practice in terms of layout and typography. Knowing that, I put more focus into developing those areas in particular.

[Image of Lela Smith taken from Google Photos.]

 

[Recordings of few designs I made on InDesign. Text and images are taken from the Internet.]

 

[Newspaper design made on InDesign. Text and Images from Internet.]

[Interactive brochure design made on InDesign. Text and Images from Internet.]

Adobe Photoshop CS6 is a fairly new software to me as I have never used such advanced software before for any editing works. Thus I did some practice work and experimented with the software to understand the functioning of its tools properly.

These are a compilation of some of my editing works which I did regularly every weekend.

[All source images belong to the rightful owners.]

1. Image manipulations

6. Liquify tool

7. Night view

[Original image edited using Photoshop.]

Learning outcome:

I realised that Photoshop has a lot of advanced features that I could make use of to create a good final product. However I also understood that I was fairly new to the software which means I will have to continue practicing and playing around with Photoshop to be able to create a creative and well put together final product. I could see my works improve over time as well.

Note: I have organised the designs based on the tool I used. The time lines I did them are different to the above order.

Initially I used The Paint software on my laptop to draw up a storyboard of a few pages of my magazine so I can get an idea of the content I will be including in this issue of the magazine. These are very simple digital drawings that I used as a brain dump to help myself get an overview of the contents I was going to put so that it was space-aware and put out in an organised manner. However I did not do the storyboarding for all of the pages in my magazine - just the prominent ones. I also made my notes on the storyboard itself to help with the first draft design. Attached below is my magazine storyboard. 

I started designing the first draft of my magazine contents page by following the layout of Elle magazine which I found really nice when I was doing my research on content page designs. I used the free software Canva to design the first draft. The photographs used are taken off of Pinterest and Instagram as I also wanted to take photographs in similar poses as it was in those images. As I was using a free version of the software there were a lot of limitations when it came to fonts and editing options. Attached below is the first contents page draft of my magazine. 

I was advised by my teacher to pay more attention when I was choosing the font colour so that it doesn’t camouflage with the photographs on the pages. She also suggested that I choose a specific colour palette for this issue and stick to it and make the pages more put together.