A N A LY S I S O F H O W I M A D E M Y M U S I C M A G A Z I N E F R O N T C O V E R

CONSTRUCTION OF FRONT COVER

COVER PHOTOGRAPH (FULL BLEED IMAGE)

I began ( the second time around) by using a different image as the centrepiece for my front cover. I chose this picture in particular for several reasons. The first being that because it was a mid shot of Niamh’s body the picture was long and

thin. This allowed me to include pugs and puffs round the outside of my magazine front cover. I also liked how Niamh was not looking directly at the audience, however the photo shows her looking over her shoulder as if she were about to turn round and engage with the audience. The fact she has her back to the readers links into my rock genre theme as it portrays a some what mischievous and devious side to the singer.

MASTHEAD

So thanks to my planning I already had my name choice so all I had to do was pick a font that I liked. To do this I visited www.dafont.com a free website with thousands of fonts that are available for download.

Instead of down loading the fonts, I took a screenshot using the snipping tool. I then saved this capture and opened it with Photoshop. This is where I used the magic wand tool to remove the outer white background and used the paint bucket to make the title red to fit in with my colour scheme.

PUG

Here is a pug of information. This tells the reader what is inside the magazine. This was relatively easy to do. I used adobe fireworks I used the text tool and shape tool. It was really important that the pugs were lined up together to make the front cover look as professional as possible. I also didn’t want to make the pug too fancy as I think it is important for this part of the magazine to be bold and simple for easy reading.

TITLE

I used ‘dafont’ again when creating the main title. I chose a similar font to the mast head, except it did not have the lines to give it a hanging effect. This was the most popular choice of the basic fonts. As with the masthead, I captured the text from the website with the snipping tool and saved into my user space. I then opened with adobe Photoshop. Again I used the paint bucket to make the text red, as I felt this colour would make the title stand out but keep within the colour scheme.

LOGO

To create my logo I visited www.logomaker.com I chose a template, and made it black and red to go with the colour scheme of my magazine. The logo was shaped like a H with lines around it. The H represents ‘heart’ for heart pound. I then used the snipping tool and saved the logo as a JPEG. I then opened this with Photoshop, unlocked the layers and used the magic wand cursor to delete the outside of the logo. Finally I imported the finished logo into fireworks, I decided that the logo looked good above the barcode as I didn’t want it to be big, but I needed readers to still be able to recognise the logo.

PUFF

To create the ‘puff’ of information, I selected the shape tool in Photoshop. I chose an oval shape and held down the right button on the mouse and moved the cursor diagonally downwards until I was happy with the size of the oval. I changed the colour fill of the oval to black, then added text by using the text tool. And it was as simple as that!

SECOND PUG

To create the second pug I did exactly the same as I did when creating the first one fireworks I used the text tool and shape tool.

BARCODE

So finally I needed a barcode to make the magazine look real and professional. Like with the logo, I did not want the barcode to bombard the front cover, but at the same time readers should be able to see it easily. So I used the search engine ‘google’ and searched ‘barcode’ in the images. When I found one that I was happy with I saved this to my user space and then opened the image in Photoshop. I unlocked the layers and used the magic wand to delete the white background. All that was left to do was to import it into my magazine in fireworks

EYELINE

So the eyeline is s strip at the very top of the magazine that usually includes the issue number, date and price. For this I used the shape tool on fireworks and drew a rectangle that fitted along the top of the magazine. I then changed the fill colour to lack. Now all I needed to do was insert the text. So for this I selected the text tool and when I had finished I aligned the three pieces of information so they looked level with each other. I then choose white for the text colour. This meant that I was staying with the colour scheme but it also stood out against the black box.