Magazine front cover - Analysis

This is my final design for the front cover of my magazine. I created it usind 'Adobe Photoshop CS4'.

The first thing I am going to talk about is the magazine name - Rock Legion.
After looking at many other magazines I found that several used the main music genre that they focus on in the title 'RockSound' and 'Top of The Pops' for example. So, I decided that the basic loose genre of music I wanted my magazine to focus on was Rock. So that was a starting point for my title, but I didn't think that just 'Rock' would be a very good magazine name, so I decided to add another word with it that would describe what the magazine was about - a coming together or music and fans, news from the musicians to the fans. I came up with many words; 'Army', 'Club', 'World' and a few others but I eventually settled on 'Legion'. I decided to use this word because it sounds slightly elite and like something private, something that is only for the people who understand it. I felt this works well because it makes the magazine sound like it has the only important information and it gives the readers the feeling that they are part of something, the music brings them together and the magazine is bringing them the information on the music. Like a private organisation almost.

So once I had decided on the title, I had to pick a font that would reflect the theme of the magazine even further. I originally designed a magazine logo on photoshop using one of the standard fonts (this is in an earlier blog) but I didn't like it and when I asked others what they thought, most said that they thought it cheapened the look of the magazine, so I changed it. None of the available fonts on the school system worked very well so I went onto the website dafont.com and found a font called 'BlackLeafs'. I felt that this reflected the music well, and so I got it downloaded onto the school system. Once I'd type out the name and got it to a font size that I felt worked well, I decided that it looked a little flat, so I used the blending options on the layer and added a 'Drop Shadow' and 'Bevel and Emboss', I felt this made it stand off of the page and look more 3D. I asked a few people to look at the new 'logo' and they all said it was alot better than the previous one. So I kept it.

The next thing I want to talk about is the main image on the cover, the image of the 2 girls. They are from the main cover band 'wHore' and I have followed convention here in actually having the main band on the front cover. I did consider going against conventions and having something else completely on the cover. One of the ideas I came up with was to have a kind of collage of images of all the main bands and features in the magazine, done in a neat and ordered way, but I decided this was too far from what is normally seen and so I kept with just having one main image of the main band. This works because it catches the attention of the audience and makes them want to read the magazine.
This wasn't my original cover image idea, I was originally going to use a high angle shot of the whole band (which I have talked about in an earlier blog). But during my research I found that a lot of magazines actually use an image of only one or two members of the band, and leave the whole band shot for the actual article. So I decided to do something similar.
I chose an image of the 2 girls pulling 'aggressive' faces because this is very common in the sort of magazine that I am aiming to create. I chose to have them pulling faces because they are in a female fronted band and this sort of band causes 'controversy' in the music scene, as bands are 'traditionally' male fronted, so these faces are like them fighting off all the criticism from people. I chose to have them both wearing leather jackets as I felt it brought a unity into the band, and enforced an image that they are trying to portray. They are both women in leather jackets which makes them look 'stronger' or 'tougher', but they aren't dressed in an entirely masculine way which portrays the feminine image at the same time as showing their 'power'. I chose these 2 girls particularly because they both have heavy side swept fringes which is very common throughout the bands in the 'genre' of music that my target audience listen to, and image is very important in this scene too, so they needed to have the right style of clothing and the right kind of hair. Everything right down to the eye make-up worn in the image was chosen because it is important to my target audience. I felt it was very important to create the right image for the band that was appropriate to the reader.

I have also taken the rule of thirds into consideration here, having the main focus of the image in the central horizontal third of the page. This is good because the eye is typically drawn to the centre of the page.

The next thing is the coverlines. They are written in a much smaller font than nearly everything else on the page (except for the information by the barcode and the issue number). This is because even though they are important, they aren't the main feature, and if I had written them too big they would've covered too much of the image and detracted from the main coverline. They are written in a simple font (Orator std) which is a standard photoshop font, and they have alternating coloured 'strokes' around them, because when I first put them over the image you couldn't see half of the writing. The purple stroke is actually taken from one of the girls hair colour to help tie everything together better, because I think that using similar colours to the image would tie it into the image better and make the coverlines blend into the cover more, which also helps the main coverline stand out even more.

The main coverline (which also happens to be the name of the main band) is written in a font called 'Bugebol Huomenna' which was also downloaded from dafont.com, which I decided to use as the band's logo font. I also used it to type the strapline(Welcome to the party) and "They're Back:" because it ties the three together. On all 3 I have used a red 'stroke' around the writing to make it stand out. I have done this because red is the first colour that the eye sees so the eye is instantly drawn to it to see what it's about.

Next, the magazine 'puff' is in a font called '28 days later' which is yet another font that has been downloaded from dafont.com. I used this because it was very similar to the magazine title font, but I didn't want to use the same font because most magazines use a similar font for their puff, not the same one. The 'puff' content is "Pure F*cking Noise". Obviously I have used an asterix for the U because swearing on the front cover of a magazine isn't seen as socially acceptable, but swearing is common within the music that I am covering in this magazine, so I felt that I should put something relevent to the scene. The actual sentence came about when I was talking to a friend and I played them some of my music. They described it as 'Pure Loud Noise' but I didn't think that loud would be a very good word to use so I substituted it. I have placed it underneath the main magazine title as this is 'normal' for magazines, and general media print.

Finally, the barcode is right at the bottom of the page in the right hand corner, and is rather small because it is an unimportant necessity. I have written the price and the Month of the issue in very small writitng (in Orator std font) very small above it, and the issue number is very small underneath the 'puff' of the magazine.