Practical Piece: Magazine Front Cover

Above is my final front cover, I have used my third option of leading article/ photo, and have used text to anchor the meaning of the image. I have used a recurring color scheme on the cover; with red being dominant, and white and black assecondary. I have included a banner across the top "New and exclusive interviews and info" this is another selling point that will draw the audience to this magazine rather than any others on the shelf; with words standing out being'New' and 'Exclusive' giving the idea that this magazine has things that others dont. At the bottom, I have included an 'Also' section, showing other famous artists also in the magazine, this is another selling point to attract established fan bases of the artists, therefore increasing sales. also on the cover, I have a barcode, issue number, date of release, and price.

I used Photoshop to edit the photo, using brightness and contrast first, then using unsharp mask to sharpen Matt Bellamy (front man), and I adjusted the curves in the photo. Finally I cropped the image to a smaller size, to draw the focus straight to Matt, rather than any other aspecst of the background in the original, such as the lighting.

For the secondary article, i am using a smaller picture in a frame on the cover. for this i am using my own picture taken at a muse concert in september of 2010. the secondary article is based on the tour of which this photo was taken.

After reviewing some popular music magazines on shelves in shops today, I noticed that in many of them, the leading/ cover artist is cut out and placed onto a white background, with text used as an anchor. I tried this approach with the picture. i like this option and have chosen to use it.

I then decided that althogh the second option was better in terms of showing the location, it was more distracting, and took away from the main purpose of the article/ front cover, being the model/artist. To try and solve this, I used a distorting sketch filter on the backround to make the model stand out.

I decided that the original picture of the model against the sound panel was slightly distracting, in the sence that is is not clear where he is or why he is stood there (the idea of the mainarticle is that the artist is recording his next studio album). So instead of using the original picture, I used photoshop to cut the model from the original backround using the magnetic lasso tool, I then featheredthe photo slightly to smooth the edges, and then dragged the picture onto the studio backround as shown above.

I also took some pictures of the studio itself that i could use for articlesin the magazine or as part of the front cover.

My First picture was of the model I am using for the main article and therefore the front cover of my magazine. I stood the model against an acoustic sound pannel in the recording studio to give a plain backround that isn't too distracting, but still linked with being musical.