× Creating My Own Magazine Front Cover and Contents Page

The main task was to produce the front cover, contents page and double page spread of a new music magazine. We got to choose whether we wanted to work in a group or on our own. I decided to work with a friend, therefore we had to produce an individual edition of the magazine but we got to use the same house style.

I approached this task of producing a front cover, contents page and double page by writing down all the ideas which I had. These were ideas such as who was going to be my target reader, which magazine company will own my magazine, how my magazine will be different from existing magazines and how I am going to attract my target reader. I also put together possible names for my magazine and the images and colours that I would like to use.


I then did various design ideas for my front cover and then choose the best one. Even though I didn't fully stick to my design drafts, they still gave me an idea of what I wanted my front cover to look like.

As I said before, me and my friend Lauren decided to do the same music magazine company, but different issues of the magazine. This made it less difficult for us as we got to share ideas and make decisions together. We arranged time to meet up out of school, in order to put our ideas together and take photos for our front covers and double page spreads. We made sure that all decisions were agreed by both of us before we went ahead with it. For example, we sat down and discussed all the colours we wanted to use and all the fonts. We both agreed on the same colours and then varied our fonts. I decided to do a special edition of the magazine, we thought that this would be a good idea because it meant that our individual issues of the magazine would differ a lot more.

The first attempt of my music magazine front cover can be found below. I decided not to use this one, as the cutting around the picture made the whole thing look tacky.

My second and final attempt of my front cover can be found below. I decided to change the background so that the cutting around the centre image couldn't be seen.

During the creation my "Electric" front cover, I had to make lots of creative decisions. The hardest part was organising and making decisions for my photo shoot. This was because after I decided how many band members I wanted, I had to decide what costumes, make up and props I wanted to have in the photos. This was hard because I had to think carefully about my target audience. I printed out all the photos I took and analysed them explaining which ones I used and why, also which ones I didn't use and why. I will discuss this further in the post about my photoshoot.

I think I managed my time fairly well. This is because I planned out each task before I even started. However, I found that I kept completing half a task then leaving it. By the end this made it difficult as I had to go back through and complete any unfinished tasks at the last minute. This was hard for me because, one of the tasks I hadn't managed to complete was my contents page. I don't have Photoshop at home so I had to arrange time to be able to use the computers at school in order to complete the task on time.

I also had to design and create the contents page for my music magazine. I think I handled this part of the task really well, however, I feel that I left it until the last minute. I only did one draft of my contents page and was happy with it which was good, but if I did have more time I could probably find things to improve.

For example, as someone mentioned in my audience feedback on a facebook comment, I could have blended the white area around the picture of me a lot better. The idea was to have it fading out so it almost couldn't be seen. The reason this didn't work out was because I struggled using the programme that I was using to make it, and couldn't get the opacity of the brush as I wanted it to be.

I would also make the neon coloured lines on the background a lot more faded. I saw from looking at my audience feedback that a few people mentioned how they struggled to read the writing against the multi-coloured background.