How I made my Front Cover.

After the planning of my front cover and contents page I then went on to having to actually design it, but before I could start designing I first of all had to take the photographs for the images I was planning to use for my front cover

For example I used this picture (Above) for my front cover, what I set out to do was to create lighting up effect so the it linked with the name of my magazine and my masthead's design, to do this I went to the city of london at night because there are a lot of lights around the city at night which create a illuminous effect and found somewhere in liverpool street which had the lighting that I needed, the lights coming from the floor going up.

After I had all of my pictures ready it was then time for to start creating the front cover of my music magazine.

What I did first of all was create a new document on A4 sized international paper

When I had the A4 sized paper up I then added the image I wanted to the front cover as well as my masthead, barcode and the text tool to write the headlines, subheadings, date of issue, price of issue and straplines on to my front cover using the horizontal type tool, crop tool, foreground colour tool, rounded rectangle tool and move tool.



                                                      

I then inserted the images I wanted to use on my front cover including a sign on the top of my publication which read 'caution' because not only did its colour scheme of yellow and black fit in with my magazines but it also created a dangerous and violent image associated with Hip-Hop.

After this there was only one thing left to do which was to insert the image of my artists which I was choosing to use as my background image into the front cover.

To do this I first of all dragged the picture I wanted into photoshop.

And then cropped the image into the shape i wanted, cutting out any unneccessary objects.

Then I edited the posterize level of the picture to give it a edgier and cool effect changing it to level 12.

After this I then dragged the image into my front cover and expanded around the whole of the publication, changing the layers to make sure it was the bottom layer so it would come as the background image of the publication.

After this i was finally finished and now had my final product which I was very proud of and I feel shows very similar conventions to real Hip-Hop magazines.