This document discusses the process of designing a magazine cover that incorporates both original ideas and standard conventions. The designer was inspired by the cover of an independent film magazine called "Little White Lies" which used a technique called "two-tone" that altered the color of an image. To differentiate their cover, the designer experimented with black and white backgrounds before deciding on white to appear more standard. They used Adobe InDesign to remove the background and saturate the color, leaving just the facial outlines. The final cover incorporated this customized image along with typical magazine elements like bar codes and pricing.

1. Conventions of a magazine cover- inspiration and/or success?

2. This is my finished final magazine cover. As mentioned above about most-modern texts, I wanted to create a magazine cover that people would recognize and feel reasonably familiar with, but not necessarily know why. There are conventions that I can link to this magazine cover , through both camera, editing and mise-en-scene

3. Original Idea The original idea for the magazine cover was from a small independent film magazine called ‘Little White Lies’ . It was clear a distinct, but also different. When I saw the image, it was something that I had seen somewhere before, but I couldn't recall where. I liked this fact, so I endeavoured to use this type of image for my main magazine cover. There were conventions found through the mise-en-scene of colour- something that I could link to through the colour alteration in my main product. Also, through shot type, this image was a close up, which allowed us to be close and intimate to the character, and that we knew what relationship we are supposed to establish with him as an audience member- an intimate one

4. However Whilst this magazine cover was clever, and of course different, I still had to conform to the standard conventions that were found in all other standard magazine covers; bar code, date, price, blurb as to what the main picture is about, but also revealing what may be inside the magazine cover. This was fine, but the problem was, I needed to find the line between having too much of one magazine cover, and too little of the other. SO how to differentiate the two?

5. Two Tone In ‘Little White Lies’ magazine cover, the image of the man employs the use of something called ‘two-tone’. What Two Tone is, is essential taking an image and only using one set block colour (either white or black), and using another colour (tone) to mark out the main features. To the left is the original picture that had for my main character, before I applied Two-Tone.

6. Decision on Two Tone There was a problem faced with Two Tone, in that I had to decide would it be better to have a black background or a white. I came to the eventual decision that whilst the black background made the product very distinct, I also needed to keep the standard conventions of a magazine cover within the product, and this would not be achieved if I used the black background. I opted for white, as I thought that it would be light, and the audience would have a better chance of seeing it, when it was contrasted with another block colour.

7. Colour Correction/ Adobe In-design Process I took the original character image and put in into Adobe In-design. In-design allowed me to take out the background layer out of the picture, and then paste this into In-design. In-design allows you to do pretty much anything you want wish a set image, but in my case, I needed to saturate the colour from the image, so only the basic facial outlines and features remained.

8. Final Image This is what the original image looked like after the correction. We can still recognise him as being the same character, but the white and black create a better effect overall, and allow it to be distinct and different.

9. Standard Conventions Now that I had used in-design to change the colour and saturate it, I could now go onto applying the standard conventions (as mentioned before) that feature in a magazine cover. In the final slide, you can see the end product and magazine cover, and how it finally looked- like a real (hopefully) magazine cover you would see in the shops.