TheEvaluation

Moses Mutanda

6

The production side of magazines is moving so fast and so effectively that things aren’t done manually and hardcopies anymore; technologies are taking over. More technologies are being introduced to speed up and spread the word to more audiences. These new technologies allow the production process to become much more creative and effective; people's lives have been made easier. Personally, I know that the technologies that were available to me really helped to create products that I was pleased with.

The technologies that I came across with were:

Adobe InDesign

Adobe Photoshop

Question 6What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing the

magazine?

InDesign

InDesign is an application created by Adobe Systems. It is mainly used by people such as Graphic designers for the production of Posters, Leaflets, Books, Magazines, Newspapers etc.

This is were I basically created my magazine pages. It was the first time that I hade used this application and it took some time getting used to it. It is fairly similar to Microsoft Fireworks, which I had used before, so I got the hang of it quite quickly.

The advantages of using Adobe InDesign are that:

You are able to choose from many Font styles, sizes and colours. I was able to able to download fonts that I liked from an online site and use them in InDesign. (www.1001freefonts.com)

The ability to use many shading effects and gradients allowed me to create unique backgrounds and fills to make each product look effective and suiting to my target audience.

InDesignadvantages

I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn’t know how to do it; this was a problem at first because I was new to the application.

If I wanted something to be in a specific colour, I had to create it myself instead of it already being available.

InDesignDisadvantages

Photoshop Photoshop is a graphical editing program created by Adobe Systems. It

is also mainly used for, as its name suggests, editing photos.

This is the program that I used to edit my images before I transferred them to InDesign. It was the first time that I had used this program so again I had to gat used to it. Although I only used it roughly 3 times, I was able to sufficiently master the tools to accomplish my aims.

PhotoshopAdvantages

The advantages of using Adobe Photoshop are that:

You have access to a gallery of image effects. There were so many to choose from, it was hard to settle for one.

The quality of photos can be enhanced very well. This helped me with the images that I took; I liked the way the image was taken but the quality wasn’t to my liking, so using Photoshop I changed the “sharpness” etc.

PhotoshopDisadvantages

Having never used it before, editing an image was hard for me. I had only used Microsoft Fireworks in the past to edit images, so I needed some help to understand what tools were available to me.