Critical Self Relection

 For this project, I decided to work on my projects individually although this project is allowed to do it as a group, I think I would be more effective by doing it individually I chose to make a magazine with a theme of travel and tourism, about the island of mine that I lived in which is Bali. Before I made my decision by changing my theme into Travel and Tourism, my first theme was food magazine, you can see on my research most of them were food magazine. I changed it because I found it hard to take a good photos for a food magazine because you need a lot of things such as a good lightning, good color etc.

Main task: is to design the cover for the magazine, contents page, double page spread, and more. 


My magazine is mainly focused on travel and tourism in Bali. My media product (magazine) employs the genre conventions from the travel and tourism sectors by featuring mostly about beaches in Bali and representative of its target demographic, which is travellers. Travel and tourism magazines use various types of convection to attract and engage readers. Such as glossy and clean looks visuals and designs, tips about a particular thing, and autobiography.  They often use specific tropes and visual cues to create a sense of adventure towards the audience. Since this magazine is about Bali, for my contents pages, instead of Welcome or Contents, I used Swastiastu instead which means hello in Hindu-Balinese. One way that travel and tourism magazines represent social groups and issues is by featuring stories and photos of travellers from diverse backgrounds such as me, I was born and raised in Bali so it represents local people from Bali.


My magazine which is Beyond Bali is a travel and tourism theme magazine. For the audience, I'm targeting teenagers and adults 18-40 that need guidance when they want to visit Bali. This is because my magazine will be mainly focusing on beaches recommendations that require you to walk a lot such as walking on steep stairs, which is doable for that range of age, Since mostly it is a hidden gem beach so you do need a more significant effort in order to enjoy the beauty of the beach. This magazine will be distributed on e-commerce, and book shops in Bali for example the most well-known places you could find easily are Gramedia and Periplus. Nowadays people are too lazy, they all want something that is instant, so this magazine is good for those types of people because they don't need to do research about a good beach again. All they need to do is just buy the magazine that I made, and then just tell your driver to drive you to the location. If the magazine has a lot of demands and I got a lot of profit, I can do endorsements to a famous traveller influencer to influence my magazine, and by then more people would know my magazine.


My production skill during the project developed, at first, I was bad at taking pictures, especially angels etc, but when I did this project, I started to pay attention to details, proportions, angles etc. I was bad at editing and choosing the right typefaces, but as time goes and doing a research by looking at a real magazine, my editing skill improves a lot because I do a lot of trial and error. In the end, I can decide what colour suits if it is combined with this background, and what fonts suit this type of text/style. I often got not satisfied feedback from my friend and teacher when I asked them what do they think about my current work. They said it was not good, not fit etc, but as I developed my skill, they started to give my work compliments which made me happy.


During the research and also planning period, I tried to make my first draft with canva, and also picsart. Picsart is a free editing app, I have used it before but unfortunately, picsart required you to buy the gold membership in order to use all of the elements that I need. So my second choice was canva, There is a bunch of templates that I could try for my trial and error and it is free. Only for some elements that required the gold membership but the rest is pretty okay because it is much more complete than picsart. They provide various choices of typefaces, text design and so on. I also used the web “Dafont”, my cousin recommended with that web because he often made typography posters. By the time I checked what dafont is, All of those ideas starts to come out because there are a lot of different types of typefaces that all of them look good on mine. So I tried every font that looked interesting and appealing to me, then used it for my product (magazine). I also tried to use lightroom to enhance my photos by using presets that are already provided by the apps, and even I tried to do it manually by asking my friend that understood how to use Lightroom. Hence, I decided to not use lightroom because my original photos were already good and HD enough for my magazine standard. Moving on to the Hardware, I used two devices when I took the photos at the location. My theme for my magazine project was Travel and Tourism meaning that I should visit the location to take the photos because I was required to use original photos taken by me and not use the ones from the internet. Mostly I used my phone when I took the photos because I think it is good enough for the standard. My phone is the new iPhone 14 ProMax which was released last year, I bought it because I thought it was a cool phone, and also many people said that the camera is really good, so I use it to take photos and the result are quite satisfying. Second Hardware that I used is my old camera which I hate the most, The quality is so bad since it is an old and cheap camera, I bought that when I was 10 years old because I joined photography class, not so good quality, The Camera is EOS 1200D.




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