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. 

Production- Adding Color

 Hello Beautiful People! My pages have been looking super boring and black and white, and since I have all the elements that I want, it's finally time to make it colorful. I know I said that I wanted the main color to be pink, but the leotards that my sisters are wearing in all the photos are black and orange, so I'm trying both. I started with the cover first and I changed the color of the border and some of the words to see what I like. 

I tried hot pink first, and I definetly love the color, but it doesn't really match everything else. I used the eyedropper tool on her sleeve to get the exact shade of orange, but it was more on the yellow side, which was way too light and not very visible. After that I used a different orange, and I feel like it's the right option, but I don't really like that color. However, I'm going to go with the dark orange since it looks more cohesive. 

I used the same shade of orange on the article border, and I changed the color of the heading. And then I did the same thing with the table of contents title and headings. 

Production- Feature Article Draft

 Hello Beautiful People! I started writing my feature article, and after looking back at my mockup, I realized that the article does not have to be as long as I thought, so I'm probably not going to use all the points that I had in my planning post, which is fine as long as I get through all my points. So for now, I used my article plan to write a draft, and I will add/change whatever I need later on. I also wanted to mention that since I have limited space, I did not include any quotes/people in the actual article, and I'll probably just have a quote at the bottom of the page. 

This is my draft

Production- Outline Headings

 Hello Beautiful People! I mentioned earlier that I like how hollow/outline letters look in the headings and cover lines, so I wanted to try it out and see how it looks on my pages. I did this by making the fill color transparent and then increasing outline thickness. 

I definitely like how the "Elite" part looks, but I feel like the "Mental Toughness" is kind of hard to read now. So I ended up keeping it and I made the "Rising Stars" bigger and outlined because it's on the plain blue part, which makes it easier to read. 

I did the same thing to the Table of Contents, and I felt like doing all the headings would be too much, so I just did the title. And I also did the article title, but just the "mental toughness" part for the same reason. 

Production- Borders

 Hello Beautiful People! Like I've said multiple times, my biggest inspiration for my magazine is Inside Gymnastics, and I've been feeling like my pages, especially the cover, look a little plain, so I decided to add a border to my cover. I added a new layer to the page and created a transparent rectangle the size of the page and made the outline thicker. I'm probably going to change the color if I change the colors of the other stuff.

I tried doing the same thing with the other pages but I made them a little thicker and I really like how they look. 

Production- Photo Selection (Article)

 Hello Beautiful People! I'm going to do the same thing with my photos for the article spread that I did with the cover. So, I added layers and photos to the empty space, and this is what they look like:

I decided to go with the first option because I don't want it to cover the words, and I don't want to have to adjust the words later on to move them out of the way. And in the other photo, her hands look kind of weird because of the photoshop. 

I also wanted to add the photo of the beam to the bottom corner so I tried different sizes/arrangements, and I'm going to have it cut off to the far right side. 

So this is what I have so far:

Production- Cover Background

 Hello Beautiful People! Right now I have two options for cover photos, and I want to see what both would look like with different page backgrounds. My original plan was to have the background of the actual photo, but blurred so that the focus was on the person. However, the option with two photos may not look good with the blurry background, and since the photos take up so much space, it might look better with a plain background. These are my two options without the background:

The first thing I did was take the original beam photo and put it in Photoshop. I removed the beam by selecting it as a subject and then using the AI removal. After that I used the "Strong Bokeh Blur" feature to blur the photo. 

With this one, since most of the photo is a white wall, if I blurred it any more, it looked really weird, so I wanted to try with another photo that had a different background. This one was already super blurry, so all I had to do was remove the subject and I like this one a lot more. 

I added more layers to my cover page, and added in the backgrounds. This is what they look like:

The first one looks more natural, but I definitely like the second one a lot more.

I also tried out the second background with the other cover and I don't like how you can see through her, and it seems a little cluttered, which is what I thought. This is what it looked like: 

The next thing I tried was a plain background. I just added a new layer, then created a rectangle the size of the page, and changed the color. I started out with grey, and changed the opacity of the back photo to 60%. I feel like because there's a lot of empty space, no matter what color I pick it's still going to feel super plain. So, I've decided to go with the 2 photos and blurry background.