Another way in which I used the internet was that I signed up to a site called Blogger; this was so I could document the planning and production of my newspaper and ancillary tasks. The site was very good, simple and easy to use; I was able to add pictures also, to demonstrate what I was documenting. It was also good that it automatically put all of my blog posts into date order; you could view them by each month or all at once. This made finding posts easier and it looked professional.
I also used the internet to visit font websites; this was to research different fonts I could use for my newspaper masthead. I gathered a few different fonts I thought may work and put them next to each to rule out the ones I didn’t like, this was shown on the first page of this evaluation.
The one other way in which I used the internet was to visit our school Intranet and go to a section called Share Point, this is where our teachers could leave documents with information on that we could print off and use to improve our work.
During the construction of my production one of the main bits of software I sued was Microsoft Publisher. I used this software to create my newspaper pages to pull everything together, such as, pictures, articles, adverts etc.
My skills were already quite good with this software as I used it to create my AS music magazine production. Although during the construction of my newspaper I still managed to learn a few new things to give my newspaper a more professional image. For example on my articles I learnt that I could ‘Justify’ the block of text. This aligns text to both the left and right margins, adding extra space between words as necessary; this creates a clean look along the left and right side of the page. This is very conventional in all articles, especially newspaper articles.
Another bit of software which my skills were also quite advanced in was Paint Shop Pro. I use a piece of photo manipulating software called Photo Shop a lot on my home PC and Paint Shop Pro is the equivalent version we have in school. I also used Paint Shop Pro in my AS production of my music magazine. This is where I mostly became familiar with all the different features you could use and apply to your photos. In my AS production I manipulated my pictures quite a lot to make them stand out more; this made them look very professional and conventional for a music magazine. The photos I used for my newspaper didn’t need as much attention and as much ‘in your face’ editing. All I needed to do was a bit of cropping and colour adjustment, anything more and it wouldn’t be very conventional at all.
Although during the creation of my poster I decided to show my photo manipulating skills a bit more, I felt this wasn’t unconventional and it made my poster stand out more than if it was just a normal picture. I created the front cover for my supplement and tilted it so it looked like the actual supplement booklet. This editing wasn’t over the top and didn’t look out of place.
The only other media technology I used was a digital camera to gather the photos to put into my newspaper and poster. The camera I used was of fairly high quality, I made sure that it was quite high megapixel so when I cropped the photos and edited them, they stayed of high quality and didn’t distort.
