Preliminary task - reflection

For this preliminary task what we were set to do was to create a magazine advert page. I stuck with my first idea which was to create a product that was suitable for the magazine I will be doing, which is teenage men’s fitness. I began by researching the codes and conventions of a magazine advert page. I chose a Dior Savage advert page as I like the way the advert is presented. I also carried out an analysis of an existing magazine advert page, which was an advert from a Men’s Health magazine. After those tasks I began to take a closer look at the product I was advertising and the company that creates the product. I found this useful as it gave me valuable nutritional information that I displayed on my advert. I then started to draw out my initial ideas of what the advert may look like. This helped me gain a brief idea of what should be on my advert and how I wanted to present it. I then took knowledge from my previous sketch up and did a new, more detailed sketch up which I called my final mock up. When it came to taking the photo, it was a different angle to what I had initially planned. I made sure that the model could be clearly seen drinking the product and also made sure that you could see the weights in the mise en scene. This was successful and made out to be a good photo to use. When it came to editing the photo, I added more warmth to the photo through Canva, which in result made the models arm muscle definition stand out more, along with the weight plates looking overall more colourful. A problem I encountered through using Canva for editing was that I didn’t have an option to blur part of the mise en scene which was other items in my garage. This meant the final advert in result ended up looking a little clustered. I used Canva to build my advert and it was very useful. I used no background images off the internet so I could paste on the product, company logo and social media icons to create a clean and professional look. Canva also gave me the option to lots of different fonts meaning I could find the perfect font for my advert. The font I chose I feel looks slightly ‘military’ which I think links to the idea of weightlifting, strength and perseverance which suits my advert genre. I was also able to create a puff for which I wrote ‘free shaker with first order’ which I felt would entice the reader even more into buying the product. I finalised the advert by making sure colours matched, sizes were correct and the advert looked as professional as possible before calling it my final version. I am very happy with how the magazine advert page turned out and have learnt a lot of useful skills about editing images and creating magazine pages. To improve the advert if I was to do it again I would find a way to blur out the non-important parts of the mise en scene. I thoroughly enjoying taking on this preliminary task and look forward to doing other parts of a magazine.