Creating My Double Page Spread Step by Step

After drafting my article that is going to feature in my double page spread, I followed my prepared layout when creating it, this involved a large background image similarly to my front cover, I felt that the background that the image of my artist was taken on did not need changing as the brick wall and graffiti fits in with the style of my magazine and of my genre.

The image on its on is effective, yet after trying out a few different filter effects I came across one called 'Cutout' this worked well with the bright colours in the background and gave the image an almost cartoon-like effect, personally I think it works well.

The next stage of creating my double page spread involved choosing my title and entering it onto the page, the title I chose for my article is 'Whats Going Through Outlaw's Mind?' Outlaw is my fictional artist I created for my magazine. I used three different fonts for my title, one font for the 'Whats Going Through' another font for the artist name and the third for the word 'Mind?', (http://www.1001fonts.com/) I decided to do this because it is a rather long title and if it was all in the same font it may look slightly boring and plain. As you can see when I first entered my title I chose the font colour black, this made the title very unclear as it blends in too much with the background.

So I experimented by giving the 'Whats Going Through' a white outer glow, this made it more visible but still not enough. Finally I decided to draw white rectangular boxes using the rectangle tool to place behind each word to increase the visibility, this looked really effective, almost like newspaper cutout's, this related nicely to my artist as the fact that he is the main feature of a magazine suggests he is in the public's interest. I also gave each box a drop shadow to make each box look separate, further emphasising the cutout look.

As a draft of my article had already been written, it simply left the job of how I wanted the words to appear on my page, as there is quite alot going on in the background with the graffiti and brickwall, it is hard to get any font to stand out on its own, therefore I took the same idea used for my main title, and created white boxes also using the rectangle tool to act as a base for my article. Through my research into double page spreads I often found that most magazines aswell as having a title also have a brief summary somewhere near the top of the page to entice the reader, I decided to use this technique as you can see in the top left hand corner I created a box using the custom shape tool and wrote a small bit of information about the artist being featured on these pages.

Here I entered my article into to text boxes, I used a larger and bolder font for my questions as I have seen this done on most double page spread interviews, it makes the question stand out on the page and breaks up the article, if the whole article was in one font and one size it would look very dull, and as my target audience is teens to young adults this would not be very ideal.

Another technique I picked up through my research is the use of large quotations of what is in the article, this is very effective as say a reader is just flicking through the magazine one of these quotes may catch their eye this gives them a preview of what the article contains and may entice them to read on.

Here is my final draft of my double page spread..

Once again I felt satisfied with my first attempt at this piece of my magazine, but for arguments sake I thought it was worth giving my other draft layout a go, I simply decreased the size of my image, moved the title, changed the size of my text boxes, and as I no longer had a large background image this left a few white spaces so I decided to give the background a grey colour this made it look slightly better, that was all the editing I had to do to create this version of my double page spread...