Making the magazine's front cover

This was my initial plan for my front cover;


It includes a picture of a well known garage artist at the bottom and the top right corner. It has small pictures in the center which I was not sure what they would include yet. It also had a main title at the top with subheadings underneath it.

I began making this plan in Photo shop. The first stage was taking the pictures:


This is a picture I took off a 17 year old girl. She sat across the floor with a white wall behind her. This is so i could turn on the flash and make most of the background dissolve into white. Once i put it on the computer I lightened the picture and blemished out the outline of the door.


This picture is from the same girl. I took a picture of her lying on the floor with her legs up against a white wall. Then I completely edited out the background with the magic wand tool and the lightener tool so it would blend in with my front cover.

With these two pictures I made the basics of my picture. I started off with making the title in blue and pink. These are feminine bold colours which will attract my target audience. I then made the blue and pink my colour scheme for the magazine as a whole. I put a title overlapping the singer at the bottom for added effect. It makes an instant statement that she is important. At the bottom is a strip of text, in blue with a pink outline, identifying what feature the singer has in the magazine. I put my logo on the bottom right fitting in with the sentence. The next stage was;

In these few steps I added music notes to the picture of the girl in the corner. This is to emphasise that she is a singer. I rotated the title to make the picture more distorted and edgy. I added a bar code and the price to add realism of the magazine. I added text about a competition and rotated it under the title. I added an outer glow to this text what made the main title have a white glow at the bottom of it. The next step I took was to add a speech text next to the main picture of the girl. I further went on to put quotes around it to let the viewer know the quote is from her.

I added a text in white and pink saying 'this week features'. Next to this text I added artist names with the outlines pink or blue. I added a music note in random places with the same outline effect as the artist names.

This is the final copy of which i added colour to the artist names and music notes as i found the page to bland. The colour makes a statement and the picture is bold and eye catching. I put little stars next to the artist names. I did this with the star brush tool. I changed the text strip at the top of the magazine to 'EXCLUSIVE GARAGE MAGAZINE' this is because I want people to be able to know what it is.