Magazine Front Cover Experiments Evaluation

I have completed my first and second attempt at creating a magazine front cover, I did this by basing mine around a fashion magazine front cover that I found online.

My first attempt

In order to gain some practice in creating magazine front covers, I was given the task to create my own based on an example front cover from the fashion lifestyle magazine 'Mode'. First of all, I took a photo of my classmate and removed the background on Photoshop to leave just the cutout of my classmate. I then added in the logo of the company and the rest of the text, keeping the typography and font size as close to the original front cover as possible. I also added a barcode image I found on Google to the bottom left corner just like the original magazine. Finally, I added a gradient background using a pale pink and purple to keep the colour palette similar to the magazine I am using as a guide.

Real Lifestyle Magazine

The step that I found easiest was adding in all of the text on the cover as once I had got the hang of designing it, I was very easy to replicate. However, what I did find difficult to do was removing all of the background behind my original image. This process took the longest to complete and even the finished product does not have straight edges around the cut out of my classmate. This is something that I will need to improve when creating more front covers for my project in order to create a piece of work that looks more professional. Furthermore, in my next project I will also need to work on adding in images for the background of my covers as for this specific cover I only used the gradient tool to create a pink and purple gradient background. By using a real image I have taken for the background, it will make the cover look more sophisticated and as if its a real lifestyle magazine front cover.

I also attempted to make an improved version of my first draft by using a different photo, cover lines and colour scheme, however I feel as though this draft was worse than my first attempt. I think this mainly because I have not improved my background removal on Photoshop so my main image is bumpy and appears to have spikes because I have not removed the background effectively. These attempts at making a front cover have confirmed for me that I will be using a main image that has a good background image for the cover of my magazine instead of removing the background image which has proven to leave my front cover looking unprofessional because of the difficulties I have with removing backgrounds effectively. I am happy with the continuity between the two drafts in terms of the cover lines and masthead which I ensured were kept the same font and size by duplicating the layout of my first draft.