Preliminary Task

This blog will document the development process of my magazine cover, contents page and double page spread.

For my preliminary piece, I designed a front cover and a contents page for a college fashion magazine aimed towards older teenage girls. I gained inspiration from studying "Glamour" magazine and observing the format of their magazine covers and contents pages. I used a classmate as a model to represent the teenage, female audience I was aiming for. I used a photograph of a mid-shot of the model in the same style as "Glamour" and placed it in the centre of the page, with the title at the top and additional information regarding the features of the magazine around the edges of the image so that the main image was not obstructed.

For my colour scheme I used pink, pale blue, black and white. I chose pink to emphasise the feminine appearance I was aiming for and to further attract a female audience. Blue provided an effective contrast to the pink, whilst the paleness of the blue still retained femininity. A plain pink background was used to keep the cover simple yet sophisticated and not too "busy" for the audience to look at. Black and white contrasted effectively when used for words and phrases because they stood out when placed next to eachother and worked well with the pink and blue.

I used two different fonts because I felt that more than this would provide a look of inconsistency and therefore lessen the professional appearance of the cover. "Hobo Std" was used to give the cover the look of informality that a teenage audience would appreciate without appearing too relaxed or too serious. "Trajan Pro" was used for smaller pieces of text and to provide the magazine with a sophisticated edge by appearing more formal than "Hobo Std".

In order to make some elements of the cover stand out, I added white boxes of information in the style of other such fashion magazines so that the cover would appear more varied without overloading the reader with too much information.

In contrast to the cover, the background of the contents page was white to appear slightly different to the cover. I used other photographs of the model and placed them down the left side of the contents page and placed blue borders round the edges to match the blue used on the cover. To provide a more informal feel, I used the brush tool on Photoshop to create pink splashes of colour behind headings, which not only matched the colour of the cover but the colour of the page numbers as well. "Hobo Std" was used to create headings because this font was more effective in emphasising important information by making it stand out whereas "Trajan Pro", because of its more formal, serious style, was more suitable for showing smaller pieces of information.