AS Media

1. AS Media
Front Cover Production

2. First of all I placed the basic layout onto a transparent A4 Photoshop document. I
did this in black so I could see how the images looked behind it, developing as I
went on. I started off by placing the masthead’s banner onto the page, resizing it
to the best fit. Then I inserted a rectangle beside it to make up a skyline. Then I
proceeded to incorporate one of my coverlines, in this case the White Mountain
coverline. I also placed the basic barcode shape on the page to gain a better
understanding of where it should be and where the negative space would be on
the image. After this I decided to incorporate my masthead (“Pm.”) into my
magazine using the typeface “Bodoni MT Condensed” as my house style.
After this I decided to start incorporating the colour scheme into my front
cover. In this case, I used a darker shade of blue into the main body of the
magazine such as the banner, skyline and coverline. I then changed the colour
of the masthead to white to improve the contrast so the audience can see it
easily in the stack of magazines. I then needed to incorporate another colour
scheme to correlate to normal magazines so I decided to use red for borders
on the skyline and the dividers between the coverlines and sublines. These
colours seemed to really ‘pop’ together so I decided to use them together. I
then put the necessary content into the skyline; in this case Artists featured.
To complete the layout I edited the coverline so it didn’t look as packed by
decreasing the size of the type, and changing the story to feature another
band. This then varied the content of my magazine and followed the
coursework spec.

3. Next I inserted the picture into the Photoshop document. After changing the
layers to make the image fit below the details, I decided that I wanted to follow
the conventions of music magazines and make the cover star look as though they
overlay the masthead. To do this, I decided to use a layer mask as this allowed me
to create fine which was needed as the stars hair was messy to connote the genre
of a metal magazine. Layer masks used blacks and whites to delete and revert
respectively so if I needed to refine an edge or delete a huge chunk of the banner,
instead of undoing repeatedly, I could just use the colour necessary to do so.
To finish off my magazine, I decided to insert a barcode however to do this
and keep it at a good quality, I had to use “dafont” to find fonts used on
barcodes and recreate a barcode to not infringe on any copywrite which could
be for example, Google. I also resized it to make it smaller and closer to the
bottom of the page because if it was too big, it wouldn’t be scan-able in
stores. I also refined the final product incorporating smaller features with the
same colour scheme as used on the rest of the magazine. After moving things
around and aligning details I came to my final product.