My Complete Front Cover for my Music Magazine

I have finally completed my music magazine's front cover, and in this blog post I will show the progression of my cover as I've made it, but also compare it with my flat plan and the cover which mine was inspired by.

My Example Cover:

 

What I liked about this front cover in which I chose to inspire mine off, is that I like the colour scheme due to the vibrancy of the orange - making it appropriate to the target audience that I had in mind. Hence it being similar to Rock sound's target audience.

 I also liked how busy it looks, as it symbolises the target audience's life style, as they may be very busy and loud people due to the type of music they like.

My Flat Plan:

 

I never really stuck with my flat plan, as I started to develop my first draft of my front cover with this flat plan in mind. However, I started my second draft that didn't follow the flat plan, and found to like it more than my first.

 Although I didn't stick with it as a whole, there are still aspects of the plan that I did follow. For example; I kept the plug and some of the kickers in the same place. Furthermore, I kept the masthead and sell line in the same place too.

 I feel like the flat plan did help, as it gave me a starting point to where I wanted my front cover to be like.

 

My Development of my Front Cover:

These were the five stages that I had whilst developing my front cover for my music magazine. I started by placing my main image onto the page, but I didn't crop the background out of it, because I wanted the location shot to represent a closeness between the artist and the audience. Although after I created most of my magazine, I wanted to see if I may have preferred a more blank, studio- like background. Therefore, I changed my background and changed the masthead accordingly, so it would stand out to the background. However, I preferred the location shot.

  I then started to add things like my masthead and my main headline with a pull quote. I also added an orange strip down the left third of the page, as I wanted to use it to try highlight the other kickers and cover-lines.
 

  I then began to add all my cover-lines to this strip, but either using the colour white or black, so they would contrast off the orange, and make them more noticeable. Moreover, I wanted most of my cover-lines to be in the left third as that's where people look first when reading. I also added the things you get inside the magazine within the sell line, in which I was featuring the free CD and the posters you get. I added inset photos here so I could show the audience a little taste of what you can get inside. You can see I changed some of the inset photos so that they would show a variety of people. Not only this, but I added a graphic feature too, in which I used the Reading & Leeds festival, and used this to correlate with one of my stories in the magazine.
 

  Ultimately, the last screenshot shows how I used a plug, in which I added a free CD. I tried to recreate the cover of the CD to try create physicality to it, and I also added puffs to this to draw more attention to it. I also shared some of the artists that would be inside the CD, to try grab the readers attention as there may be one of their favourit
e bands/artists on the track.

My Complete Cover:  

This is my final version of my magazine cover.