Front Cover Development

In this post, I will be updating my process for developing the front cover page of my magazine.

Reflection:

With this front cover page I really just learned that if an idea is not looking good as I put it together it’s just better to restart instead of trusting the process sometimes. I think I spent a bit too much time on this singular page because I was trying to decide the overall theme. It was honestly a trial and error method for this one and I’m glad everything worked out in the end. Again, I did waste a lot of time due to the changing of programs though so I’ve learned my lesson! I think that if I do this project again in the future I’ll have more specific references for what I want earlier on!

Here are some thumbnail sketches I made to have the rough idea of the layout and pose I'm going to use for my magazine cover page.

 

Here are two pictures I took of my peer. I directed her to pose similarly to two of my magazine thumbnails. I'll develop these images digitally and make a rough draft of the layout they would have.

Here are some of the fonts I thought would look good for the masthead. I mostly kept Y2K in mind because I was trying to go for a similar vibe and recently there has been a recent trend in people using the Y2K style again.

The drafts for my front cover end here. I took the photoshoot and I took a look at the pictures and realized that this theme that I was trying to use was not going to work out as the nature of my pictures seemed to be more "mature" to use this type of typeface for the masthead and style. Therefore, I am going to completely scrap the layout I have made so far and just start improvising based on the images I'll use for the front cover page. Here is what I've written down for my process!

References I kept in mind while designing this new front cover:

Some conventions I could note down after looking at the examples:

1. These magazines often use bright colored mastheads to attract attention quickly.

2. They also usually feature numbers in big text size.

3. The model are teenagers or young and famous.

4. The coverlines often discuss about love advice.

Which convention am I subverting?

I did not discuss about love advice in one of my coverlines because I'm planning to add that into the general article page on my contents section instead. For the coverlines, I mainly wanted to focus on mental health issues and solutions instead since it is one of my magazine's unique selling points.

Here is a step by step walkthrough of the production process:

After that, I added a price for my magazine. The price, $18, was what I settled with after researching and looking at the average price of teen magazines. On average, the price would range from around $20-$33 which is actually quite expensive. Since my aim is to target middle income teenagers who most likely don’t have too much disposable income, I decided that in order to make my magazine more appealing for purchase, I’d like to make my magazine a bit more cheaper than the others in the same genre which will also help it to become more competitive in comparison.

Heres my final product: