Evaluation - What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

The new technologies I have used during the construction of this product are:

• SLR camera

This enabled us to take professional looking photo's for our front cover and our contents page. It meant that if we took a photo of a person dancing then it would capture the movement in mid-air. This added to the lively, energetic nature of the magazine. This was a specific effect in which I would not of been able to do with an average style camera. However, I did find some of the functions on the camera slightly confusing and frustrating, for example: How to turn the flash off.

• Adobe Photoshop

This function was really good for editing photos, especially the photo of the model on the front cover. We learnt how to airbrush photo's using the 'spot healing brush' and how to use the 'magic wand' tool in order to cut out the background of photo's. Also, it had an easy way of moving and rotating pictures. However, I found that some of the functions on photoshop were very hard to master - such as the layering orders of the page. I feel that I will be able to master photoshop with consistancy.

• QuarkExpress Passport

This was very good for designing the contents page but I found it very confusing. It was similar to photoshop, yet a lot of the tools were hidden and I found it took a long time to do the smallest action - such as moving a photo. I did however, like the way you could set a picture to the size of a picture box.

• Scanner

We used the scanner to scan in photo's to upload onto our blog. This was very frustrating because the scanner was extremely slow which meant we did not have that much time to continue to edit our contents page and front cover.

• The Internet - dafont.com

This was a really good website which enabled us to find the perfect style font for our magazine cover and contents page. As we needed a house theme, we only needed to find around four different styles of font for each of the conventions although the fonts could not be inserted straight into our photoshop design - which was very frustrating. They had to be opened before the application which meant the computer would sometimes freeze.