Research into blogging

Now I've been using blogging for a while now, I've been considering the strengths and weaknesses of blogging. One of the main strengths of it I think is that I can make it personal to me, as it allows you to include a photo of yourself and choose a layout that suits you. It's also another strength that blogs are interactive. This is helpful because it means you can include video links, images off the internet, scanned images and podcasts in your blog as well. These can explain the work you're doing better. Another strength is that you can follow other people and perhaps get tips from how they are writing in their blogs. I also like how you get more freedom from doing blogs in that you can write as little or as much as you want.
However, there are weaknesses in it as well when concerning including your own paper based work in the blogs. You have to scan it in which can be time consuming which sometimes defeats the point of blogs being quicker to do compared to hand writing it.

Mock up of magazine cover

I looked around the internet to get inspiration for good layouts and then designed mine by hand in pencil first just to get a good idea of what it will look like. I didnt want to create something on the computer that I ended up not liking. I did three ones by hand, and then chose a final one to actually create on a desktop program. I ended up using the program Photoshop to create my mock up. All images I took from the internet I edited and I tried using a use of three colours for a scheme to keep it simple but appealing. In my previous research I noticed that most magazines have a large image on the right or filling the whole page so I followed that idea. Overall Im quite pleased with my mock up cover because of the dramatic colours I decided to use. I couldn't decide however which final one to use because there were two images, one with a close up of the music artist and one with a mid close up shot. I'm considering showing them to my target audience to see which one they prefer before I decide on which kind of shot to use in my final cover.