Front Cover Creation

Front Cover

The first part of my front cover creation was the masthead. I have showed the design and creation of this in my previous post. I created a fresh A4 photoshop document and began developing my front cover. Firstly I pasted in my masthead and found a good size. I wanted it to take up about 1/8 of the length of the page as this is a common size for a masthead and is a good size so it is easily visible by people who glance at the magazine on the shelf. Secondly I added some magazine content information in yellow above the masthead. I chose yellow as I wanted a colour that went nicely with the red and was much brighter. This information gives a small preview of the magazines content and is fairly easily seen by passers. I also added some additional information in white below. I made it white to contrast the black shape I placed behind. I wanted a colour pallet of red, yellow, black and white. 

The next part was adding a model. I decided to follow the general convention I found of one large image of one model. The model fitted into the target audience and could represent the buyers of the magazine. During my photo shoot I took images of the model from each side. I did plan on a role of each side like a police photo of a criminal. However, I just wanted one main image so decided against this idea. I added the main image of the models front and applied a black and white filter as I felt there was too much colour and the page may look messy and I wanted a clean feel to it. When it was done I felt the picture was a bit plain. I then started thinking of ways to manipulate the photo to make it more interesting. I then remembered the cover of an album I had seen. The album 'Watchtower' by Devlin featured and interesting design that The cover used a main image and then added another image on the top for a kind of ghostly feel. I thought it was interesting and it gave me the idea of adding my other unused side photos onto the main image. In the end I ended up with two faces coming out of the side of the main image. I felt the photo was interesting and much less plain than my original plan.

Finally I added some additional magazine content information to the page to fill the empty space and give teasers of the magazines content to entice viewers to read and buy the magazine. I also added a fairly large caption to the image explaining who the model is for people who wouldn't know. This is used on other covers such as the NME magazine and Brink. People may know the name of an artist but not know what they look like so this might be enough to interest them in the content. 

Overall my front cover went well and I had little problems in its creation. The small amount of problems I encountered were only due to saving problems and slightly lose of work.