Evaluation: Question 6

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

I learnt about a lot of different photography skills during the process, such as mise-en-scene and the connotation and denotation of certain camera shots. Also, about how each shot and people’s body language will affect the reader in a certain way. I learnt about eye contact and about what it means if someone is looking away or looking straight at the camera.

In Photoshop, I learnt about the different effects you can add to a photo to make it look a specific way. For example, my front cover photo was originally very dark, so I brought up the brightness using Photoshop. Also, I learnt about stretching a photo’s colour at the edge to make it bigger or to move the people to one side of the photo. In InDesign, I made my double-page spread. I learnt about the construction process of making a double-page spread, for example there are construction lines that you can follow so the product looks neat and tidy. Also, I learnt about the different ways in which you can show text. For example, you can carry the text on to another box by syncing two boxes together.

I had to overcome a few tricky challenges, such as, learning how to use InDesign straight away as I hadn’t used it before. I also had to overcome the times when the font I had used for most of my text had gone from the system. Picking a similar font helped in this situation until the font came back after I restarted the program. I learnt a couple of things about some technologies, for example, before the task I had never really used a Mac before, so I had to get to grips with the software and hardware.

There were other technologies that I learnt about, such as Blogger. I had never used Blogger before, so therefore I had to learn everything about it. I had to learn about uploading different texts to Blogger and how to get a blog set up. This meant that I could add videos, pictures and text to a post and then put it into the list of posts in my main blog. Another example is SlideShare. This was to put my PowerPoints on to Blogger I had to make an account so I could upload PowerPoints to the site, and then copy the link to Blogger.