Production Review Week 3

When looking back at my schedule, I set out this week in my lessons to:

a: This lesson will see me double check of the article for the second DPS (York), and place it into the layout. Therefore, this lesson will be mainly focusing on finishing the second DPS, and finalizing the design of it.

b: This lesson I will begin to look back at my flat plan for my Cuts Crisis DPS, and then begin to create it in InDesign.

c: This is a continuation of the previous lesson, however I will now be placing in the article, and working around the length of it, and the way it looks on the page.

d: Project Monitoring & Continuation: In terms of monitoring I will re-look over the current stage of my production, and what needs to editing. This gives me a general idea of where I have come from the previous week, and plan what still needs to be done to create the magazine. I will also continue with my third DPS.

This week, in terms of following my schedule I have done most of the things I set out to do, and I have also come across a few issues/ideas which means some of my work needs to change. It's been a pretty successful week in terms of making progress with work, but it has also been the most stressful so far, which is never fun to deal with. 

In terms of what I have achieved this week: 

On Monday, although I didn’t have a Media lesson, I started my Cities DPS in InDesign, getting a rough idea of what I wanted to create and achieve with it. This was an initial idea, and although I did reference back to my flat plan, I didn’t follow it as my idea about that page has changed since then, thus by the end on Monday I had started to create my DPS, and had also checked over the article, and taken the word count down so it would work better, and simply because it was too long. So, in terms of Monday, it was somewhat successful, however as you will see, my idea changes, and this was possibly due to bad planning on my part about how I wanted to go about creating the Cities DPS.

This was my first DPS attempt on Monday, which I really don't like, therefore I did change it, but it looks too dark, drab and of course I haven't placed anything into it yet, at this point. I was just really disappointed with my lack of ideas, which sounds stupid, but I was just irritated that I couldn't think of anything to actually create. 

By Tuesday I was still working on the Cities DPS but by this point my idea had changed  I looked through some magazines such as Company and took more inspiration from them, which really helped me out actually, as I was getting to the point where I just couldn't think of anything to do. But again I didn't like the idea I had gone with, so the first two days of the week I was struggling to actually come up with something that worked and that I even enjoyed making. 

So, by the end of Tuesday my DPS had moved to this: This shows little progress, and by this point I was thinking of just leaving it, and moving onto something else. 

On Wednesday we had our hour and a half lesson and this was where I could really change my idea and work on it properly. By this point I accepted the fact that my article was long, and that I had to create a layout which worked around it, thus I placed the header in the corner as seen below, and allowed for the article to take more prominence on the page. I kind of knew what I wanted to create, and instead of just randomly creating an idea, i used magazines as guides, which in hindsight I should have done in the first place. As you can see below, by Wednesday I hadn't quite placed everything it, but I really liked the layout, but at this point I felt it needed more colour and more features, as it felt too bland, which I worked on through Thursday. 

This is currently where my page stands, which, if I'm honest I'm really happy with. I think the colours work out well, the layout is effective and hopefully it doesn't look too text heavy, and out of all my DPS's for this project so far, this is definitely my favourite, which actually brings up a few problems in that I actually want to go back and change my other ones. So, I'm making more work for myself, but I hope to keep up with it and on top of it. I love the breakout box, and considering my lack of progress on Monday and Tuesday, I really do like this DPS a lot (yay!). 

By Friday I had started changing my Uni Blues article, because, as mentioned  I have decided to use the above DPS design as a kind of 'house style' for which my other products will follow. I'm not actually editing too much of the Uni article, just the layout mainly, and this is where it currently is at: 

I like the 'Penguin' style, and hopefully it works out well, as I am currently on the fence about whether it works or not. At this stage there isn't much I can comment on as I really haven't done that much, but hopefully I can continue to keep creating it, and this time next week it is in a finished state. 

For homework I set out to:

Homework 1: This homework will be getting my target audience to have a quick look over my current work, and gain both positive and negative feedback.

Homework 2: For this homework I will be re reading all the articles I have created, and double-checking they have achieved what I wanted them to, in terms of what I laid out in the treatment.

Homework 3: The third homework will be double-checking over my images, and making sure I am happy with them all.

In terms of homework I did everything I set out to do which worked out nicely actually, as it fitted alongside the work I was doing in class, and I got some really nice feedback off Tom about my articles, which is great. He said, "I like the blocked text and breakout box. The use of colour is good and the 'Talking Point' buttons look great". I also have re-read the articles, and I think they work nicely, plus I did double check my images and I have loads to choose from and work with so there's no problem there. 

I think the hardest thing this week was just deciding on an idea, then once I had it, I've now decided to change my other previous DPS's which I was initially going to return to much later, so it's been a mixed week, some stuff worked whilst other things didn't which is okay, but is stressing me out slightly. Hopefully I can just keep going, and not start to change my idea's too much, or I'm making this whole process harder for myself, and it's also hit me how little time we have left, and how much other work I have to do for my other subjects, so this week has been good and bad, hopefully next week goes better in terms of being dazed and confused!