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

Constructing the product forced me to use a lot of new technologies, most of which I had not anticipated I would need to use at all. I started making the front cover on publisher, which took a bit of getting used to as I had not used it in a while but I got the hang of it fairly quickly. My main problems were editing the sizes of pictures while keeping the same aspect ratio, and also ordering the pictures so the text covered them, instead of them covering the text.

For the contents page and double page spread I used Neo Office on the Macs. The Macs took a lot of getting used to as I had never used them before, and did not even know how to turn them on at first! But I slowly got better at using Neo Office and can now use it to a reasonable level, editing and creating my contents page entirely on there. However I needed a background as there was too much white so had to transfer the double page spread to Microsoft Publisher which I had not expected, and was quite challenging to take it apart and then reassemble it, especially as I had left it quite late to try and add a background so did not have much time. However once it was in Publisher and I had put everything back in the original layout, I was able to add a background to the pages.

I also learned how to use the digital cameras better. I had brought my own digital camera in originally but as we shot most of our photos in the drama studio it did not work as well so I needed the stills cameras to be able to adjust the settings properly so it could adapt to the dark environment. As well as this I learnt how to transfer files from the camera to the computers.

On top of all this, I learned a lot about editing photos, becoming a lot better at resizing pictures so they kept the same aspect ratio instead of blurring when they were made bigger or smaller EG I had to do this with the main cover image so it fit the page properly, cropping pictures down which then not only made them look more professional, but made it easier to resize them, and using the blur and lasoo tools on Photoshop.

Finally I used a font site to download a font called ‘Badaboom BB’ to the Mac which I then used on my contents page, and I had not known how to do this before.