Creating My Cover Step by Step

After researching front covers, choosing my magazine name, fonts, and choosing my front cover image, I decided that it was time to start putting my magazine cover together.

Here is Screenshot of my background image after adding the 'Fresco' filter effect I mentioned earlier...

Once I was satisfied with my background image the first thing I thought I would add is the masthead...

After doing this as you can see the 'Monthly' part of the masthead because of the background is not easily visible, through my research I found that it is acceptable to change the colour of your masthead through each issue, therefore a colour change was definately necessary here.

Having 'Monthly' in red makes it much more visible, after playing about with a few different colours I thought this came out the best, it also fits in nicely with the colouring of the artists clothes in the main image.

Next I had to think about adding the artist name onto the front cover, this had to stand out, and as I was following the layout of one of my previous drafts I already knew where I was going to put it.

The font for my artist name had to be large so it is easily seen by consumers, I found this font in 1001fonts.com, I personally thought the font suited the artist name as it has an unorthodox way of writing letters for example the letter 'O', grime itself as a genre is often related with breaking the rules, there for this rebellious font fits in well.

Next I had to think about cover lines, I already knew what was going to feature in my magazine so now I just had to choose the correct font and colours to make my magazine cover look most affective.

Seeing as I had already incorporated red, white and black into my magazine cover before doing my cover lines, it made sense to stick this theme, I chose a font called SF Port Mckenzie for my cover lines also from 1001fonts.com and I wrote some words in black and some in red, at first they didn't stand out enough like this so I added an 'Outer Glow' of the colour white which really added that something to the cover lines.

Some of the conventions of a magzine is the barcode, date and price, this for me really finished of the cover and gave it that professional look as if it was an actual magazine being sold in the shops today.

So here it is...

Even though I was more than satisfied with this front cover I thought it still made sense to try out my other draft layout just to have something to compare it too, I went through the exact same process as the making of this cover yet I used a different image, different layout and different theme colours, here is what I come up with...