Constructing my Front Cover

 This is when I started to create my Main front cover for my magazine. I created this in photoshop and it took me a long time and a lot of dedication was needed. I started with a plain white background and started building this up via the main story. This maybe wasn't the smartest of idea as I should've started with the main image and built the main story around it. But after coming up with a good storyline I added it with the star character in a bright yellow colour and the story underneath in white. I used these certain colours because my photo is very dark and gloomy which goes with my main story.

I then imported my main photo. I went to a local railway line to get this photo, because I wanted it to give a sense of danger and make the audience realises what my main story was about. I wanted it to take up the background and I wanted the main musician to take up around 60% of the cover so he would really stand out against anything else that would happen on this cover.

The main photo is arguly the most important part of my cover as it is the first thing the customer will se and pay attention too. I needed my main protagionst to stand out and really appeal to my target audience. To do this I asked many people about what would attract them. I then edited this image very slighty just so I could adjjust the brightness and make it slighty darker as the story isnt a 'happy' or 'fun' one so I wanted my colours to represnt the story.



The next stage I went onto was creating and inputting the masthead. This was one of the most important things I was going to do in this whole process and the masthead had to be catchy and attractive to my target audience. I was doing an indie/alternative magazine I needed a name which would relate to that but also sound catch. I came up with the name LO-Fi. I put this in a black font in the top left of the cover roughly taking up 10-15%. Looking back I reckon it would of stood out lot more if it was bigger and even possibly in a bolder font. Althought I thought this im glad it chose a black font but with the letter being empty so you can see the blue through them. This actually made my masthead stand out even more as the black stood out from the background.

The next two screenshots include the next steps I  carried out to creating my front cover. I started to add more text to my cover to attract more customers due to the artists listed on the cover. I added some more yellow texts below the main story. On this screen shot you can see that I started creating the secondary stories which will go down the right hand story of the cover. This text is in black as it will stand out from the light blue background behind it and also the colour matches the colour of the masthead which is positioned next to it.

After inputting the black text I started making stories to follow down the right hand side of the cover. This stories included popular artists and bands inside my genre. This will attract a lot more people who might not of been attracted by the main story. The colour of this stories match my colour pallet and the main story of Yellow and White. This looked really good as these sub stories matched my main one via the colour scheme. This gave my cover a real profesional look and I was happy with this.

After taking a step back and looking at the content on the cover the left hand side of the cover looked empty and this wasn't good. I Then tried placing some smaller images of the main protagonist but this just seemed to make the cover more messy and the photos looked out of place. I decided to add even more stories there in the same way as I did earlier and this worked really well for me.

Moving on I decided to add one more story above the other on the left hand side. I wanted to crate a small circle and add a story involving a festival. This would really stand out and draw a lot of attention to my magazine cover. I started with a yellow circle and a black boarder as it followed my colour pallet. I also wanted this different than the normal way of putting stories onto my cover as there would of been too many of the same things. This is the sweetspot of the cover where people will first look so I wanted this to look good and really attract my customers.


As I built it up I added in some basic text which was in black as that also fitted my colour pallet. I then added in the reading and leeds logo which is a very popular festival in the UK and it stood out really well. The way I added in 'Reading and Leeds' festivel was a good idea purley down to the huge popularity it has. People will see this logo and straight away want to see more so this was a big selling point for my cover.

As I almost finished my cover I could still visually see that my cover was missing a few simple things such as a barcode which I placed on the bottom right and then I added in these darken ages to give in more of a darken feel as then it matched my main story. I was very happy with the final outcome of my cover. I felt like espically the little things on this cover will give the biggest overall effect. I feel like this is a really strong cover and would attract alot of potential customer who are intrested in this genre.