Constructing My Front Cover

The first thing I did when creating my front cover is choose the photograph I wanted to use for the cover shot and open it in Photoshop. I then enlarged it to fit the the cover where it would look best, and I left a gap at the bottom because that space is where the menu bar would go and so this part wouldn't be seen anyway. So when the image was in place I created this menu bar due this being a common convention of maagzines aimed at a younger rock audience.

To create the menu bar I put a white rectangle across the bottom of the cover, filling the space that was left before, for the background of the bar. I then used another smaller rectangle in a blue colour that I took from the image so the colours are all linked. To create the arrow effect I used a hexagon shape in white and put two of the sides over the blue rectangle. There's probably an easier way of doing this but I thought this was good enough.  I then found a picture of a barcode and put this on the right before adding all of the text, in Arial.

After the menu bar was finished I worked on the masthead and the banner. I put a rectangle at the top in the same colour as in the menu bar and put on the masthead I had created. I then made that fit across the top and put a blue bar underneath to complete the masthead, before adding the text onto the banner. 

The next thing to include was the main text in the centre of the cover, and for this I looked at many style models to see which would be the most effective. This kind of design looked good so I adapted it to fit my cover and created my feature text with rectangles and text. For most of the text on the cover I used Arial font, because this is easy to read and give a really clear, standout effect that makes the reader want to read what it says. 

Lastly, I added all other teasers with rectangle boxes and text, mostly in Arial but with "Reading and Leeds 2014" in Cracked, this relates to Hall's youth theory of youth being rebellious because Reading and Leeds festival is known for its crazy parties and large mosh pits when listening to rock acts. For the text and box colours across the whole colour I used a lot of inversion so the text stands out and follows the rock genre colour palette of a lot of black and white. For the other colours, I used blue, purple and yellow, the blue and the purple taken from areas of the cover image and the yellow there as an eye-catching contrast. Furthermore, as well as keeping the colour palette fairly tight, I used colours that were chosen by the target audience in my audience research, as blue, yellow, black and white were colours they wanted to see.