Construction

By Salaffina D’ore

For the background of my front cover I decided to take a picture of a brick wall from the building in school. I chose this after I went though a lot of patterned backgrounds, however I then figured that it never look as realistic as real products, so to make it more realist I thought id use a real wall.

Using a real brick wall also links to the genre of my magazine ‘Grime’ which is portrayed as a ‘ghetto’-’streetwise’ genre.

Once i uploaded my picture I thought it would be a good idea to have the wall grey. So by using Photoshop I went through many effects like chalk&charcoal chrome and many others. The reason why I never use one of the previous effects is because it was either effected too much or spoilt the pattern of the brinks in the picture. I also look and experienced with different textures but they never look to good either. Then finally I found a effect called Conté Crayon, which is a filter. This effect gave it a smoother look not as ruff as the original image.

After I chose the effect I place a image on top using InDesign and I noticed that effect never match the scene so I jus converted the original image into black and white. Once I did that I changed the colours a number of times, the main reason for this is because the colours did not match the colour palette of the genre of the magazine. I went through different shades of purple and blues before I found the colours needed. The colours I used were colours similar to what the artist was wearing in the picture, this helped it look more realistic and professional.

While experimenting with the different colours I though instead of colouring all the bricks why not just do some. I then came up with the idea to colour the bricks that are around the image, and that’s what I done.

The colours I used were the colour of the artists polo shirt, and colours similar to it to make it look more effective and bright. The reason I chose the colour of the artist clothing was because there wasn’t a lot shown on the image and the bit there is will reflect of the background, automatically drawing the audience into looking at the magazine

I used different variables and effects and still struggled to get the bricks the colour I wanted. Creating the background according to the main image was quiet hard and took a lot of time and concentration.

Now I had the background sorted, I had to edit and cut all of my original images I done this by using a tool on photo shop called magnetic lasso this magnetically cut round the body shape when I drag the mouse. This was a easy tool to use because its quick, however after using it I still had to use the eraser to edit some of the background when I had zoomed into the picture.

I continued to do so with all of my images.

As well as cutting around the pictures I also edited the image itself. As I mentioned in my evaluation real magazines sometimes edit the faces off the artist to make him/her look more attracting and clear. I also did this I used a tool on Photoshop called spot healer which removes any spots or bumps on the skin.Even though its mostly beauty magazines that edit faces other genre do to.

I also used a smoothing tool that evens out the tones on the skin. This gives an effect, and makes a big impact on the magazine.

After editing my images and placed them on my background on InDesign, I then started to think about the layout of the text. My image took up quiet a bit of space so I had to figure out which size was best for the text, without it being too small.

This part of creating the cover was a difficult part for me because I spent so long on the background, and had no time to redo it so I, put a glow effect of a different colour around the text so it would stand out because of the size. I also did the same with the main story title.

When creating something on InDesign to get the best result is to use different layers for different images and text. I used up to 5 layers while creating my magazine cover, content and double page spread.

The layers help structure the images with the text and helps with the over lapping.

Most hip hop/urban magazines that have a busy front page normally go with a plain, calm background for there contents page. The design I choice was from the magazine I was referring my magazine to, however I reversed the colours because of the colour of the text I was going to use.

For my double page article I went there the same steps I did with the front page and contents page, although I did find it much easier with the double paged article because I only used to layers one for text and one for images and the space between them worked well

By using Photoshop and InDesign made a big impact on the editing and structure of layout of my magazine. Even though I found that InDesign was hard to use at first, I soon got the hang of it and created a successful magazine cover, contents and article.