Magazine Progress

Magazine Cover

This is the first template draft for my magazine. I went for a plain pink look, with simple text. My idea was for the main image to take up the whole page with no text in the way. However, I wasn't a fan of the overall design so i decided to make a new draft. 

 I made a new draft of my magazine template, complete with a title, issue number and date. The image is yet to be added. In place of my main image is a black square, as the image will be a person in black and white, this allows me to work around the empty space that I will have the image in. So far I am going for a minimalistic look, yet still trying to keep it interesting.

I added in an existing photo of a musical artist. I made the image grayscale and cropped it to fit nicely, then added text on top of the image saying the artists name and what page the interview with him will be on. This is a placeholder until i can take my own image and insert it here using the same format and set-up. 

I created another draft with this image and using a different set-up, but kept all the same content. Personally, I prefer the other set-up and that is likely the one that i am going to use in my actual magazine, at-least so far. One thing from this i liked was the pink box with white text to keep the artists name in, so it may make a return in future drafts.

I took this photo of my friend to replace the existing image that i have on my magazine. This is the photo before any editing was done. I used this once as it was the clearest image I took in my shoot and had the best lighting. It also fit the theme and aimed vibe of my magazine. 

This is the image after i switched it to black and white in photoshop. I used different colour sliders and settings to ensure i got the exact coloring I needed, rather than just switching it straight to grayscale. I also cropped and resized the image. 

First, I placed the new image on my second-made template, to see if it looked better with the new image/ It came out quite well and the image was a fitting size. 

I then tried it with my preferred template and ensured it was sized correctly. Unfortunately, the pink text did not show very well on the white shirt in the image. I decided to use a black rectangle to make it clearer against the background, and I may try it with different colored rectangles to see how I like it.

I decided I wanted to see how the cover would look using different colours for all of the text and I prefer this new one a lot more. This is likely going to be a lot what my finished design looks like as I  feel it fits my theme and aimed aesthetic a lot better. It also just looks a lot cleaner in my opinion.

 I also made a red variant, so that I had different forms of the same design to choose from, but I personally do not like this and will continue to use the blue one, as I find it a lot better aesthetically and in-terms of what I want the consistent theme of my magazine to be like. 

Here, I took another picture that i can use as my second image on my magazine front cover or two-page spread. It is unedited here but already has a nice visual appeal due to the darkness and the bright lights.

Here, I decided to go back to having rapper Kevin Abstract on my front cover. to make the image my own, I cropped him from his existing background on photoshop and added him to my own image. I also heavily de-saturated my image, increased the brightness and amped up the colour to make it appear black and white, but keep the colour of all the lights.

Double Page Spread

Here, I started my double page. I immediately disliked this draft, but liked the image of the artist that I had used and looked to keep it. 

Then I decided to use a gray background behind the image but have it cut off after a certain point. This creates a nice effect with my title, since it doesn't have an inside fill. I made the outline of it pink as a callback to the front cover, to add consistency. The article also overlaps the background change, making that have a nice effect also.