Thursday, 11 March 2010

Main Task - Music Magazine Contents Page Second Draft

This is the second draft of my contents page, and it took me a long time to do all the changes. This is primarily because each line of text is in its own text box, and I had to go through and individually re-position each one and move text from one line/text box to another line/text box. You may also notice that all the text has been compressed slightly; this was to make room for the new picture I added. I removed the old man due to criticism from both my peers and myself, and replaced it with a picture relating to one of the main stories. This actually makes the contents page more realistic, since it is more likely that there will be a picture relating to one of the features which the magazine is showing off about rather than depicting one of the regulars at the very bottom of the page.
The image I used was cut out from one of the first photos I took, though I did not post it with the others. That's why I'm posting it here, for your convenience -->
I had to edit the photo quite a lot; I removed Jonny's spots, got rid of his red eyes, lassoed around him before doing the finishing cutting out touches with the eraser and then used the blur tool to smooth out his edges. I put a frame around the cut out Jonny and applied a stroke and drop shadow effect to it. I decided to fill in the frame's background in red, though whether I'm going to keep it like that I'm not sure as it looks quite obtrusive. I finished it up with a lens flare effect and a suitable caption.
Despite definitely making the contents page more interesting the picture forced me to move all the text around which was extremely annoying and time-consuming. I did it though, but I feel that perhaps the original text layout was a little better. There's not really much I can do about this, as if I had kept the original text layout there would have been no room to insert another picture. Also the re-arranging of the text meant that I had to change some of the text slightly to make it shorter and allow it to fit in, such as "Sexii's House" to "Doobey" (fortunately removing the band name "Sexii's House" was no great loss, though unfortunately the replacement name wasn't any better).
The final things I did were to change the page number of the Kerry Anne story and move the caption referencing it up slightly. I made the former of these changes when I realised that a double-page spread would have to start on an even number, and the latter change was made to try and make it look like there was less blank space.
If I do make any further changes to this contents page it will likely only be small things, like the background in the picture of Jonny.

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