Evaluation Question 6

Question 6: What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Creating this product has taught me a lot of about the technologies involved with making it and also with some not directly involved with creating a media product.

1. Blogger.com

I have never used a Blog before and rarely used anything on my Google+ account beyond YouTube. Creating this product and my evalutaion as well as adding notes and updates via my Blogger account has been educational in that I know know how to use blogger and I see that there are many benefits to basing your work on a blog to act as both a professional diary and provides a timeline of your work and pacing to reference for self-improvement or other reasons. I have also learned how to insert multimedia like video clips, images and links to my blogs, learned how the layout works, and how to copy and share links to your posts via it as an easy way to distribute and show my work.

2. Surveymonkey.com

Another thing that I have used as a direct result of creating this media product is surveymonkey.com, which has been great for collecting opinions and suggestions for my product. I first created a survey for what name to use out of the multiple I had come up with, with EXOSKELETON being the one. Then I acquired general feedback through another survey which gave me insight into the target audience and people's opinions + knowledge of the genre.

3. Adobe Photoshop

I have definitely learned the most about this program than I have anything else. While I have pre-existing knowledge of Photoshop from high school and personal use, I have learned a lot of new things about the program, colour range selection, alpha channels, blending options, use of noise, aspect ratio locked transforming, skewing, and other miscellaneous things were all previously unknown to me before creating this product. One example of something harnessing new ideas that I've used is the method of putting lightning onto the front cover model's glasses quickly and easily.

I duplicated the layer of him, used the lasso tool to cut out his sunglasses lenses, revealing the lenses on the layer behind, then made the back layer partially transparent and placed the lightning between the two layers. This is also why the grid layer behind can be seen.

Another thing I have learned to use in Photoshop is noise layers, which were used on the front cover and the Double Page Spread. As you can see, there appears to be a star field behind the neon grid. This is in fact a layer of random dots of noise on a black background which creates an effect similar to the night sky. 

4. Adobe Illustrator

Prior to this assignment I had never even opened Adobe Illustrator before, but a youtube tutorial harnessed it to create a black grid which I would use for the geometric grid in photoshop for my cover and double page spread. I now have a slightly increased understanding of Adobe Illustrator and it's uses, but not to a large extent.

5. YouTube

Creating this product and looking for tutorials on how to do many of the things done in Photoshop and Illustrator lead me to YouTube where I discovered that YouTube is a great source of information including tutorials on virtually anything including doing things in Photoshop. I found an especially helpful Tutorial which detailed how to create a retro 80's Sci-Fi logo using elements very similar to those of my front cover. I used the same techniques but but applied them differently to distinguish my cover from it.