Construction, Front Cover

Firstly, I created a grey/white background using the gradient tool in order to blend both colours together to give a more professional effect and also thought the colour choice would go well with my chosen front cover photograph. I Then used google in order to find a font that I thought was most suitable for my magazine and had relations to its genre. After choosing the font I then resized it to the size that I thought was suitable for the cover.

 I added text above the title in white accompanied by red bullet points to separate each topic. I decided to put this above the title as these would be the least important topics within the magazine therefore not needing to stand out as much as other cover lines. Also the use of this gives the audience quick insight into some of the things the magazine will consist of.
 

Here I organised what I'd done so far making sure everything was aligned and in proportion to each other. I then opened a new window on photoshop and used the lasso tool to carefully separate the image from its previous background. After this I used Photoshop tutorials on Youtube to teach me how to smooth out the edges of the image as some of the corners were "sharp" and looked noticeably cut out. I re-sized the image and placed it centre of the page adjusting it until I was satisfied with the outcome.

This is where I began to add more cover lines. I had to think carefully on how they were to be positioned and the colour of the text making sure that it matched with the colour scheme and house style of the magazine. I also added more text at the top as I felt it looked a bit plain and that adding extra text was more effective and made it look better. I played around with different fonts and font sizes again making sure that the font styles didn't tremendously differ from each other in which the font style is to also be carried out through my contents and double page spread.

As you can see here, I have gone back and edited the title of my magazine as I thought it was pretty plain and boring and looked like It could have been created via Microsoft word. I edited the title by adding a glow on the outside of the text along with a shadow to give a 3D effect and make it stand out on the page as the title is one of the most dominant features of a magazine cover. I also changed the shade of red on some of the text, I did this by extracting the colour of my models lipstick and using this to type up any red text required on the page as I found that the previous red was too bright for the page and stood out too much. I also added some text at the bottom of the cover advertising the main topic that the magazine will consist of, again using the glow tool to help the text stand out and preventing the red from blending in with its background which the audience would find difficult to read. A 'sticker' was also added on the top right hand corner again extracting the red from my models lipstick and infilling the circle that I drew with it, then I added a shadow to the outside of the circle by clicking on the effects tool. Some text was added in the circle in font colour white but I found that it looked too 'flat' compared to the circle around in therefore I used the shadow tool to give the text a 3D look which was also done with the use of the effects tool. 

Here I've simply added more cover lines in various sizes and two different types of fonts. I used the same technique (glow and shadow effects) to keep the magazine style consistent throughout the cover. I thought carefully about the position and alignment of the text although I didn't have to think that much as I already had a flat plan, yet when creating it on the computer I discovered that it was very different from creating it on an A4 piece of paper as measurements and positioning isn't always exact. I focused a lot on the alignment making sure everything was structured, neat, parallel and very well presented.

At this point, I assumed that my magazine front cover was complete, although when looking at it again, I realised that the 'quote' cover line at the bottom wasn't very effective and the chosen font was not suitable for the magazine therefore I edited the font to what I thought would suit it best, although I found this very difficult as the cover line at the bottom is meant to represent something quoted from the artist portrayed on the front cover therefore the look I was going for with the 
 font choice was an italic, calligraphy style therefore I looked for a font using google in which I found a website called www.dafont.com; a site for people like myself to download all different types of fonts and font styles. This site was very useful to me as it was easy to use and managed to find exactly what I wanted. After finding the font I created a new quote and added it to my front cover.

This was the end result of the magazine cover: