Hardware and Software

To create a product of high quality, the software and hardware I choose is very important.

I have played with a number of different  image manipulation programs and DTP's to see which is most suited for my task. I immediately discounted programs such as Paint which would be wholly inadequate and unsuitable for creating a magazine.

 I began with Photoshop, however, despite it’s fantastic power, I found it lacked the user-friendly qualities I wished to have from my chosen software. Indesign is also an industry favourite, however, I was unable to get access to it, so I chose to use Adobe Fireworks 8.

I felt Fireworks 8 blended user friendliness with quality perfectly. I was able to quickly produce products of great quality with seemingly limitless options to alter images and text. It also allows the user to save in a large number of formats so not to limit its usefulness. Despite being considered a lesser piece of software than Photoshop and Indesign, Fireworks is competent enough to produce industry quality magazines.

This use of Fireworks does challenge the conventions of the creation of magazines. Fireworks is traditionally a piece of software used to create websites, but I feel it has all the traits needed to work very successfully as a desktop publisher.

For basic image manipulation I used Microsoft Office Picture Manager, despite being very basic software, it allowed me to prepare images to be entered into Fireworks, where the finishing touches would be applied.

To take the photographs required for my magazine I have decided to use my Panasonic Lumix camera. Despite being a compact camera, it has an ability to take images of exceptional quality, this coupled with its portability and durability gave me the formula for a fantastic tool. I decided against using SLR’s as my magazines photographs are likely to centre around live performances and without a press card, it is all but impossible to get a high quality SLR into a gig.