Production

For my front cover image I adjusted the curves to lighten it, make it sharper and give it an unnatural edge.

Doing this bleached out the snow and deepened the green of the bushes and the yellows in my model’s hair.

I think this worked really well and helped me work on further images throughout the project because I didn’t realise quite how dark they were until I had made one brighter.

Since I decided to use plain but bold font colours on the cover making this adjustment made the image bolder as well to match.

When I first came up with the magazine name there was always going to be red in the masthead. I didn’t realised just how well it would work with the front cover I was designing. The cold whites and blues would have left it looking a bit bland and, in this way, the masthead gave it a bit more colour and, therefore, drew a lot of attention to itself.

I used a snowflake brush in an ice blue to keep with the winter theme.

The larger and black snowflakes served to highlight some of the more important cover lines such as the main cover line.

The red in the masthead also helped develop a colour scheme for the magazine and I found that the soft shade of red and the hard shade of blue went quite nicely together.

To keep a consistent house-style, I used the same font as the masthead with the same cherry motif to keep the red colour constant.

When I had filled in the contents page with the information I found it looked very bland and boring so I used a brush of wintery branches in the same blue and red I had previously used to make it look more interesting. I think it worked very well because before there were too many blocks. It needed to look just a bit more busy.

When finished I found this space was left very empty. I tried various methods of filling it such as images of the front cover or double page spread. Eventually I used a pull quote with a red box which was very difficult to place right but in the end worked very well. It also had the added effect that it drew attention to image’s importance and the page number of that particular feature.

Like the front cover image, for images on my double page spread, I adjusted the curves to lighten and sharpen the colours. However, this time I went for a softer approach so they are nicer to look at. The front cover image is quite harsh because it is all about attention and by this time the magazine will have already got the audience’s attention. I wanted something more artistic and a little sweeter

For the double page spread I moved away from the cherry-red and font for the masthead and headers I had been using.

I tried various fonts for this header which didn’t work because I wanted something that was in keeping with my winter theme. In the end I chose this font which, I think, links well with the contents page branch brushes. This font is also more daring than the rest of the font used on the page just to make it stand out that little bit more.

The constant black font got a little dull to look at after a bit of thought. The pull quote in blue broke the big block of text up.

In a lot of the magazines I had researched there was some emphasis on the first letter or word of an article so I simply increased the size of the first letter and placed a black block behind it.

I found it was a very quick and simple way to make the article look a whole lot better.