Cover construction

   

The first thing that I did was add my chosen image into Photoshop in order to begin the creation of my cover. As my image was a quality image of action I did no need to edit it too much else it would fail to represent my target audience. One thing that I did was crop my image so that t was a good size for my cover. I also zoomed into the image slightly so that my star vehicle was the central point of my cover page. The next thing that I did was to add my masthead. My masthead was in the Myriad Pro font which is a simple font and I used the gold colour from the Cornish badge in order to attract my target audience from the regional prospective and this would be my colour scheme throughout my product. The next thing I did to complete my masthead was to add the Cornish dots logo above the ‘I’ to take the regional slant further.  I placed the mast head at the top of the page and made it 1/8 of the page. Both of these are common conventions found on magazines.

    The next thing I did was add my stories. I did this using the text tool. I used the text tool to add my stories in a times font, as this was a basic font that would appeal to my target audience.  I made the text a different font style to the masthead in order to make the stories stand out and come off of the page to the consumer. I made the title of the stories black; the black used of the Cornish flag and made the teaser about the story the same gold colour as the mast head.

   The next thing I did was to add my main story. I used yellow text boxes similar to the masthead colour, but slightly brighter so that they would stand out more. On these text boxes I overlaid black text that read, “Exclusive” and “latest match reports” these teasers are a common convention of football magazines. I used the black font to maintain the colour pallet and to make the text stand out on the yellow text box. Secondly, for my main story I added some text from FreeUrbanFonts that read “Daniel Rundle” once more I made this text a different font to the other stories and the masthead, I also made it a different size for the same reason. Beneath this in yellow I added another teaser. Beneath the main story I added an image for another story inside the magazine. This image was a long shot of a football match. The image is backed by a yellow text box, which again makes the image stand out. The use of images on the front cover breaks up the text and keeps the lower age target audience more interested than all text.

   The final thing that I did was to add a barcode and the web address for my magazine website. It is a common convention for a barcode to be on the bottom of the cover, along with the price.  The web address was added underneath the barcode in the same yellow font as the teasers in order to make it stand out, to encourage the consumer to visit the site.

As I felt that my magazine cover was not as professional and as good as I thought it be i decided to make some more alteration and additions in order to increase the professionally of my product and follow more conventions in order to enhance my product. 

The first thing that I did was to put the masthead behind the main image. I decided to do this as most of my masthead was still visible and you could make out what the masthead was so this wouldn't prevent my product from becoming known and it increases the professional look of my magazine. I also changed the style of the font on the stories to make it more bold. This meant that the text was more easily visible from further away, which will draw in my target audience. I then added the date of the issue and the issue number into the top right hand corner using the text tool. I using the move tool, I move the second image on the page to the right hand side. I did this because the left hand side of the page was looking to crowded and moving it helped to break up my cover. I also put a yellow layer behind my barcode using the box tool in order to make this and the cheap price stand out.