Creative Critical Response

Question 1: How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

Question 2: How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

Question 3: How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

Question 4: How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

 

Final Magazine!!

Hello Beautiful People! It's finally done!!! After many many hours of hard work, here is my final magazine:

Production - Final Touches (Pages)

Hello Beautiful People! This is my last ever production post, and the last thing I need to do is fix up my spreads before being done with the whole magazine. The first thing I need to do is super duper easy, I just have to make my name bigger/bolder on the article page. I changed the font from regular to bold, and increased the size from 18 to 22. 

The last thing I have to add is page numbers. I added tiny little numbers to the corners of the pages.

For the table of contents, I just put the number next to the headings. Since the rest of the magazine is hypothetical, I just guessed and tried to space them out as best as I could. 

Production - Final Touches (Cover)

Hello Beautiful People! I'm almost done with my cover, there are just a couple more things I need to do. The first one is super easy, I just have to change the font of the "Mar 2026" since it doesn't match at all. I changed the font and made it white, and then I added an orange outline to make sure it's visible. 

The next thing I need to add is a barcode, so I used an online barcode generator to make one for the code "123456789". I made sure there is a white outline so that it is visible with the background, and I added it to the bottom left corner of the page. 

My last (and hardest) step is to re-edit the beam photo since it's really messy and pixelated. I brought the original photo to photoshop and removed the background again.  I enhanced the colors a little, and then used the AI took do enhance the quality. I don't think it made a huge difference. 

I also tried using the generative AI to remove all the chalk marks on the beam because I feel like they look messy, but it turned out really weird and added a bunch of random lines. 

Anyways, this is the final image and this is what it looks like on the page:

Production- Adding Quotes

 Hello Beautiful People! The last thing I have to add to my magazine is the quotes at the bottom of my article spread. I'm going to use these two: 

"I have to focus on my mental health...We have to protect our minds and our bodies" - Simone Biles
"I remember my teammates being so chill... and I'm having a mental breakdown" - Laurie Hernandez

I wanted them to be big and bold, so I only had enough room for the first one, but I think it's enough. I made the font bold and orange, and I outlined her name. This is my final spread: 

Production- Final Article

 Hello Beautiful People! I made a few changes to my first draft and cleaned it up a bit. I was worried that I was going to write too much, but after pasting it into my pages, I realized that it was actually too short, and I can add more. So, I elaborated on the solutions and added more to the end. 

This is my final article

I copied and pasted it into my two page spread in InDesign, and I was able to make the beam larger. This is what it is looking like!

Production- Table of Contents Photos

 Hello Beautiful People! The last set of photos I need to add is my table of contents. My plan is to use the action shots to make a progression sort of thing. I'm kind of skeptical about how it's going to look, so I also have tho bars photo as a backup. 

The first thing I did was open up the four photos and arrange them in order on my computer desktop so that I know what order I want them in, and this way I can add them to the page in order. 

Since I'm not that good at InDesign yet, the photos and layers get confusing for me, so I decided to make a separate file to arrange the four photos and then I would add them to my Table of Contents page after. I used the rulers on the top and side of the screen to estimate the size of the top area, which was about 100x22 pixels. I created a separate design with those dimensions, and then added all the photos in separate layers. I made sure to adjust the sizes so that all the silhouettes were the same size. 

Since they were already the right sizes, it was super easy for me to just copy and paste the individual images onto the page. Since they're pretty small and I didn't want all that empty space, I had the idea to have them on the left page, and the bars photo on the right. However, I could only fit the first three on the left, so I had to have the last one on the other side, which is fine. I also made sure to arrange them so that it looks like she is standing on the title. 

I do think there's still a lot of empty space, but I think this will be okay for now.