Constructing My Front Cover

To create my front cover I first looked at some style models that were similar to what I had wanted to do and then i designed my flat plans before creating this final product.

I started off by adding the text onto the page. I first added my main story which I put centrally as this is where I wanted. I put it centrally as this would be one of the main places that someone would look early on. I also used bold typography with the bright colours so that it would attract and draw in the audience. I used a black background temporarily so it would stand out and be of a similar colour to the image that I will later put on.

I also did the same for all of the smaller stories, again using the black background with the same colour scheme as used for the main story. I placed them around the page in a similar way to how I had designed in the flat plans. This is here, as shown:

To make the stories not look too hard and to make the cover look with more depth and better style. I did this by changing the opacity of the text. I did this so that they would not look as hard and would be much more professional and so would draw int he audience. This is like shown:

I then added on my final masthead. I placed it centrally to start with as this is where the common conventions say they should be found.  I will later move this around so that it would fit in with the image I had wanted to use. 

I then added my own image on the cover. The look of the image meant I have to change around the layout a little. However, the final image ended up looking like this:

This is the final look of the image. The image I started off with looked like this:

I created this image look, by taking the normal colour image and copying it and changing that second image into black and white. I changed the shadows and highlights, as well as brightness and other such things. I then lowered the opacity so it would create the look as above, I did the same for the contents page and double page spread too. It was done as shown:

Once this was done, I moved the layout around to fit around the image, and the masthead. This ended up looking like this:

Then the final thing I did was to add a barcode at the bottom, along with the issue number and date to create the covers final look, which follows the conventions found on existing magazines. This is as shown:

After looking at this, I started to work on it, moving some pieces around, and changed the masthead to my original one,  to make it look even better in its final form.