The document describes the process of creating a magazine cover design. It involved taking a photo of a brick wall for the background, converting it to grayscale, and selectively coloring some of the bricks. Images were edited and cut out in Photoshop before being arranged on the background in InDesign. Text size and placement took some adjustments to balance with the large background image. Multiple layers were used in InDesign to structure the overlapping images and text.

1. The Construction By Salaffina D’ore

2. 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.

3. 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 Cont é Crayon, which is a filter. This effect gave it a smoother look not as ruff as the original image.

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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 .

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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

13. 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.