These Titles are just Quotations

Today I decided to rename my blog posts from things like "So Yeah" and "Rrrrgh" to better titles that were actually just quotations from the posts themselves. I also thought that quotes taken out of context could be fairly funny, so I decided to do something like that for the previous post. That's why it's called "Boring Stuff that we 'Need To Know'". It's sort of a sarcastic quotation, but I realise that some people may think that I'm being completely sensible with every aspect of the blog.

Here's a tip - don't take these posts too seriously. Please. These titles are just quotations taken out of context. If you're gonna take them seriously then I'll pretty much have to sacrifice a good few hours at the end of the course to go through and rewrite EVERY SINGLE blog post. And anyway, if there's one thing I know about blogs, is that if they're supposed to be taken seriously, then 9 times out of 10 they're no fun to read. As far as I'm concerned, blogs are meant to be fun to read.

But anyway - Media.

We were given a pair of magazine front covers to analyse. We used the theory from Tuesday to do this, so there wasn't really a lot of theory work we could do other than going over what we'd already covered in the two-hour lesson on Wednesday.

Could someone please inform me why these images
are being rotated. I mean, seriously. This is ridiculous.

It did it again. Hopefully it's just because
these are the images that were sent via Email or something,
since the images in the previous post seemed to be fine.

These are the images that we analysed today.

And these two posts were created in the last lesson of the week, so the lesson's work is basically what you've presumably been reading for the past few minutes.

Boring Stuff that we "Have To Know"

I'm a little behind with what I'm supposed to be blogging about, so I'll just have to write twice as much in half the time... Wait, that's not right. I've still got the same amount of time... Although I am doing twice as much... Yeah.

Look, there's a reason why I didn't take maths for A level.

But I digress (yeah, I took English instead). I'll do this post for Wednesday's work - basically, it was a lesson spent doing more theory than actual practical work, which basically means it was spent "learning" or whatever, doing boring stuff that we "have to know", or something ridiculous like that, rather than the cool practical stuff we get to do with Photoshop.

There was a lot of theory we had to do. I'm talking about around five full pages of notes, with the analysis of a front cover taking up a double page spread. I made sure I analysed the hell out of that front cover. It was all about the basic and the more complicated aspects of the features that are used on the front of a magazine, the ways in which these can be used to make them look appealing to audiences, through the use of colour, font, style and contrast, interesting ways of aligning the features on the page in such a way that stands out, etc.

Basically, we learnt about the four main aspects of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity, which was related to the positioning and content of the different parts of the cover. We learnt about font styles (basically about Serif, Sans Serif, Script and Display types of font), advertising content, the attention / interest / desire and action needed to be pushed onto the reader by the design of the cover, and finally how to use the Image and the power of words to convince people to buy it.

Yeah, there was a lot of theory.

The magazine cover that I analysed the hell out of.
For some reason, Blogger decided to rotate it around. I hate this website.

Although it all makes me wonder how things stand out amongst other magazines, when they're all designed to stand out... I dunno. That's probably a question for another lesson. Or another class entirely. Perhaps even a different stage of education. I'm rambling. I'll stop that now.

Less Like A Rubbish Poster

Last lesson we were given the task of learning how to use Photoshop in two hours, being shown the basics by someone who obviously knew what they were doing, but hadn't accounted for the fact that the laptops the rest of the class were using were rubbish. Mine, for instance, decided to go into hibernation halfway through the first hour, losing all the (rubbish) work that I'd done up to that point.

Anyway, I managed to learn a little bit of how to work Photoshop. Google could probably do the rest for me.

This lesson, we're trying to use what we learnt to come up with the front cover for a nature magazine. I just copied a cool-looking picture off the internet, cropped it to fit an A4 sheet of paper, added some words in appropriate colours and mumbled something about "minimalism". Here's the product after about fifteen minutes of work and another fifteen trying to resize and upload the bloody thing;

To be honest, I'm pretty pleased with it already (even if the colour is a bit... purple). It's looking a bit bare though, so some more words advertising the magazine's contents would probably make it look better.

brb lol

The text makes it look less like a rubbish poster and a little more like an actual magazine. Bear in mind that I'm not exactly paying that much attention to what the text actually says, and rather focussing on actually including it. Just to make it look good and stuff.

A More Serious Post

So after realising that quickly making my first blog post twenty minutes before the end of the school day was probably a bad move, I decided to log in at home and make a more serious post.

Cue a few frustrating minutes of entering the same login details at least five times before Google decides that, yes, I do in fact have a blog, and lets me access it rather than going straight to the "create a blog" page. I have now decided that I hate this website.

But anyway. What I failed to mention in Friday's post was the actual reason for having this blog in the first place. We (that is to say, me and the other people who took AS media) are going to be designing and creating our own music magazine thing, and blogging about its progress along the way. There will be lessons on photoshop and other stuff like that, as well as research into other music magazines. Which should be cool.

Every single thing that we do in these lessons are supposed to be recorded here - the blog itself will be marked and used to give a final grade, along with the finished product. The amount of marks for each part and the more detailed analysis for what we're going to be doing is in my book, and I'm sure anyone reading this would just find it boring if I listed that stuff, so I won't.

...

Look, I've never really made a blog, so I have no idea how to end a post without it looking like it finished with an awkward silence. Do I give it a conclusion? Do I just write "THE END" and click the publish button? I don't know. I'll figure it out eventually. Until then, I'm just gonna stop typing.

Ten Past Three

Spent a whole lesson in the library, trying to figure out how to make this thing. It's currently about ten past three, and I'm making my first post. Yay.

There is literally nothing to talk about. I've made a blog, and have no work to put on it. This blog is today's lesson. This is literally the most pointless post on any blog ever, of all time. It's like a Facebook status, but with less people reading it. And more words. And better spelling. And less expletives. Okay, it's nothing like a Facebook status (well, nothing like my statuses anyway).

I guess I also kind of read about the specifics for the course I'm currently on, so there's that as well. Just another few sentences to make this post look worthwhile to any casual observers.