Thomas Atkinson

Magazine Cover Evaluation

My chosen genre for the cover was a music magazine, which I decided to call Sound and Vision, named after the David Bowie song of the same name. This acts as a reference which the target audience (similar to Rolling Stone's audience, people who are

fans of classic rock and pop as well as modern music) will find easy to understand.

For the magazine cover, I decided to use Photoshop to create a music magazine cover, borrowing images from the internet and some that were part of a photoshoot that I was involved in. To seperate the images from their backgrounds, I used the magic wand tool and selected the bodies of the people in the images, moving them to the magazine cover. All of the rest of the cover was created using text and shapes. I have never used the magic wand tool in the same capacity before but all the skills used were ones I had used before.

One of the strengths of the cover is the stories featured, which include a fictitious Glastonbury line-up and an interview with producer Rick Rubin. They are brilliant for the target audience to whom this is aimed which is people who are interested in the production side of music as well as the commercial side. It is also a more formal magazine, reflected by the font and lack of bold colours, both in the background and the font.

I like the layout because it shows a hierarchy of how important the stories are within the context of the magazine; for example, Rick Rubin is a large image which takes up most of the non-black part of the cover but he is at the back, whereas the three people in the fictional Glastonbury line-up are at the front and smaller. The positioning on the cover relates to their importance within the magazine but the size of each refers to their musical reputation and

relevance.

Another reason that this is notable is because the text at the bottom of the cover is ordered and sized according to the importance of

each part of the story; for example the headline is Glastonbury and the first three acts are the main acts of the weekend. The second three are afternoon acts, prefixed by the word ‘plus’ which implies that they are add-ons to the main story.

A possible weakness for the cover was originally the fact that the text about Glastonbury was hard to read against the both the original white background provided by the Rick Rubin picture and

Thomas Atkinson

the darker background of the three Glastonbury acts. It was suggested that I add a black border so that the entire set of texts was easier to read. It was but it then added the problem of seeming too informal and cluttered, despite the fact that it actually only includes 5 images, most of which have been either cropped or downsized.

I like the cover because it seems like the sort of magazine that I would buy (partly because I chose stories which would interest me). It also has a nice layout and good images. However, the black background is slightly distracting from the rest of the cover, since it seems slightly out of place with the salmon red of the text and creates a large contrast with the black and white Rick Rubin picture. However, it does look like a formal music magazine to a large extent.

If I were to do the cover again, I might choose a different set of cover stories to simulate a new issue of the same magazine and try to choose font colours more suited to the background, which would probably not be white.