Producing Front Cover - the development

The first thing i laid down on my blank page was the masthead, i decided to position it in the top left corner as seen on most magazines e.g. NME, Q, We love pop etc. I then created a sky line with my slogan 'Celebrating the best of british music' this would reinforce the genre of my magazine and make it easier to understand the meaning of the GSOQ. I wanted this to be quite a strong feature so chose a black background but with yellow writing to make it stand out. I then included a second skyline which included famous british band names, this acted as a puff to advertise what was inside. I decided to leave the background white for this bar and have the writing in alternating blue and red fonts - the colours of the british flag.

For my cover image i chose:
 

I thought this image represented the music aspect of darius rather than his personality which i liked because i wanted the double page feature on him to be about the music. However i thought the background was too busy as the main image so i used Photoshop to remove it, i then overlayed it. (Right) is what it looked like, there were many problems when using photoshop as i am not familiar with the tools so i was not completely satisfied with the smoothness of the crop. Also after transferring the image from photoshop to publisher many small white marks appeared which were not visible on a white background but very noticable on a coloured background. In order to not be able to see the white marks the background of my magazine would have to be plain white. To help me further develop my magazine i looked at other magazines which had used a plain white background.

What i noticed about all these front covers with white backgrounds was that the cover image took up the majority of the page to minimise these whtie parts. With my image it is quite narrow so therefore my cover would look dull/empty. Also the images used on the above covers are high quality whereas on close inspection my image is slightly pixelated and not the best it could be. With these problems in mind i chose to use a different photo.

On Thursday 29th October indie rock band The Vaccines were playing at the 02 academy in Birmingham which i was attending, Darius was also attending so i used this as an oppurtunity to take more photos. This also enabled me to use Darius in his 'gig clothes'. I chose the setting as the underground subway, this backing was not too busy so i could overlap different fonts on etc yet also had small pieces of graffitti on which made it look quite cool. This is the image i decided to use:

Using publisher i 'sent image to back'
By doing this it enabled me to apply fonts on top of the image, the only downside was that Darius' head would be cutted into by the masthead. Using photoshop i cropped out the top left corner of Darius' head (see above) and then applied that on top so that Darius overlapped a tiny bit of the masthead, this is a typical feature on some magazines.

Looking at the top of my front cover i thought it looked a bit too structed and 'squarey'. I thought it looked a bit dvided in that it used the same shapes and angles. I decided to include a puff in the right hand cover.

After looking at many NME covers i noticed a frequent feature of a free poster puff in the top right hand corner. In all 4 examples the puff involves an image (presumably the free poster inside) with no writing on top. The image also seems to be at an angle positioned in a white frame. On the images where a single person is shown then a medium close up with the person looking directly at the camera (see example 3 - Kurt Cobain).

To help create my puff i enlisted the help of another media student, i got him to pose looking emotionless directly at the camera as a direct mode of adress. I chose a plain light blue background so that it would not require me to photoshop again which could be time consuming. The light background also created a dark shadow on it which worked well. Here is the image i took:

I then cropped the image so there wasn't as much background and that about 80% of the image was of my model. I also cropped off the top of his head so that it brought more attention to the eyes which look directly at the reader. After cropping, i slanted the image and created a white frame around it, as an extra i added a shadow so the image didn't seem as flat. I placed the image in the top right hand corner cutting through my skylines, by doing this the word 'Music' had to be sacrificed so it now read 'celebrating the best of british'. 

Next i moved onto working on the bottom of my magazine. I wanted to use the bottom of my magazine as an anchorage to advertise some of the musicians who will feature inside. Keeping with my genre they would all be british artists and be slightly varied in genre e.g. ed mumford and sons and the libertines. Above are a collection of the different styles of bottom bars you can find on different magazines. 

Here is a plain version of my footer bar before i edited it:

I then used the same font as my mast head (US 1.0.1 from dafont.com) to add different band names/musicians to it. All artists picked were british, the ones i chose were; mumford and sons, ed sheeran, jamie t, blur, the libertines, ellie goulding, bowie and the vaccines. Using a different font from microsoft word i included the word 'plus' in the red arrow, this was used to show that them artists will be included somewhere inside. I then chose to incorporate the bar code, price, issue number and date in there too. Here is what the finished result looked like:

 

The final stages to finish my front cover was to apply the cover story and other stories inside. I looked at a number of different magazines and saw that they just listed different musicians, as i already had quite a lot of musicians at the bottom i only added a few more. I also included the t in the park logo as an anchorage for what is inside. I then worked on the cover story, on many front covers the main text is a quote or a summary of the main topics they talk about inside. I decided to have a quote as it would be a snapshot of the interview inside, i chose my quote to be "noel gallagher bought me a pint". Noel gallagher of oasis is seen to be a god of british music, in 2011 he won the godlike genius award so to have a high profile name like him on the front would attract my target audience. I also chose to have Darius' name running straight across the page in a bold white font, i took inspiration from this from the way 'Florence' was printed on an nme cover (see below)

For finishing touches i added a sort of scribble under 'Darius' to make it look like he had signed it, this would be a personal touch to the magazine. I got this idea from a copy of Q magazine where tinie tempah had signed his name, scribbed and put a x. As i was using a computer it was not possible for me to write darius as handwriting without it being messy/unreadable so i opted for just a scribble. Here is the Tinie Tempah Q cover and my attempt.

Here is what my finished front cover looked like: