Preliminary Task - Making of the Front Cover

This is the original image I took for my preliminary magazine front cover. I decided to make Tom, who is the person featured in this photo, look away from the camera to make him appear mysterious and enigmatic to the consumers thinking about buying the magazine. He has his arms crossed to make him look like he is covering up or keeping to himself adding to the mysterious aura of the image.

In this print screen of Photoshop I have started to edit out the logos on Tom’s hoodie as they do not fit in with the theme of the magazine or image and make him appear younger than I would like as the logo on the left hand side of the jumper is a secondary school logo. I used a colour selector tool to select a colour nearest to the logo and then used the brush tool to go over the logos on the jumper.  

This is the image when the logos have been completely removed from the hoodie, this makes Tom look older and also as if he could anyone. I edited the image to make it smaller by cropping out the bottom of the image. This makes the Tom’s face appear bigger on the page as well as giving him a more direct feel towards the audience as they can see his face more clearly.

At this stage I decided to edit the image to make the contrast between the hoodie and the background greater. I did this by editing the levels of the image, making the hoodie darker, and the background whiter. This gives Tom a feel of dark undertones possibly relating to his personal life or to his new album when he features as the artist ‘Lance Colgan’. 

 I thought the Tom’s hoodie looked plain so at this stage I decided to edit in the image of a fish to look like it actually appears on the hoodie. This adds to the mystery of the image as it appears as an unrelated item on the hoodie. This entices a possible consumer as they might want to find out why he chose to wear that particular hoodie or possibly where they can but one. 

I added the head mast ‘Indie Prophet’ in front of Tom’s head as it establishes straight away what magazine it is. I decided to use the head mast of ‘Indie Prophet’ as it establishes what genre of music the magazine covers, ‘Prophet’ is used to infer that the magazine is a prophet in that it talks about the next big thing in music.

I added a barcode to the page to make the front cover look more professional and like a real magazine you would find in a shop. This adds to the look of the page and is placed in a convenient place as it doesn't cover the image.

I added the main sell line in white at the bottom of the page so it would contrast with the black of Tom’s jumper. I used an ambiguous sell line that would make people want to see how or why the new album will ‘change the world’.

I added the puff word ‘win’ along with another enigma code to the magazine to make people more attracted to the magazine and to fill up the blank space on the page. This entices the reader to buy the magazine as they have the chance to win tickets to see the artist featured on the front of the magazine and they would buy the magazine if they were interested in the articles featured within it.

In my final magazine for my as level I plan to put the image in front of the mast head to make it look more professional and like a magazine you could find in a shop or supermarket. I also plan to use a more interesting image and use sell lines more interesting to the reader and more focused on a specific target audience.