Final Magazine Reflection

Creating my magazine and all of the blog posts throughout the year was not the easiest task. I've faced a number of challenges and problems, as well as a lot of accomplishments as a result of those difficulties. As media creation was something I had never studied before, learning and experimenting with it always required time. For the most part, it is how I created my magazine.

My initial idea was to create a fashion magazine. It is something I enjoy and thought therefore would be easy to make. Starting with the cover, I think it is the most important part of the magazine. It is the face of it, which gives recognition to the company. More about giving recognition, my masthead is ‘Sweet’. I came up with it for many reasons. I was controversial about it at first, because I was also considering another name for my magazine such as “Charm It’. In the end, I decided that ‘Sweet’ is a better match with the idea of my article, because it was aiming for teen girls. To me youth relates to the joyable period of life, where you learn and gain experiences, it is something sweet.

Again, because it was all new to me, using the program with the hardware was a little bit more of a struggle. Photoshop was the program I used to create my cover since I was familiar with its main tools and felt comfortable using it. I chose to take the safe option to not mess up and use a program that I was previously experienced with because, in my opinion, a magazine's cover is its most important component. However, I chose to use InDesign for my table of contents and double-page spread. I made this decision since I had seen a lot of gorgeous works created in InDesign while doing research. I reasoned that it would be beneficial to challenge myself while also learning how to use another design program. The most challenging part, though, was making the double page spread and the table of contents. As we no longer did practice projects in class, InDesign had entirely different tools from Photoshop and was more difficult to accomplish on your own. It took me a good amount of time to get used to the tools, as well as research for tutorials that cleared me with the ‘dead end’ that I have faced.

In the end, I continue to be proud of my efforts and the outcomes. I believe that all of my hardships and successes have taught me to continue working hard because I now understand that the more effort and time I put into anything, the better the outcome will be. In addition, this year gave me the fundamentals of using editing software and gave me a broader perspective on media and its history. I was really looking forward to taking the media studies course, and I'm glad I had the chance to do it in class, especially alongside my friends. I now have a greater comprehension, as well as the ability to analyze meanings and media creation in general. Experience from creating my magazine especially has left a lot in my mind and helped me to understand mass media.