Magazine Front Cover-First Draft

In today's media studies lesson, we were creating a draft for the front cover of our magazines. This draft shows where I am going to place everything on my magazine. Before I started my draft, I had to research different front covers of magazines, this gave me an idea of how a magazine cover should be presented. Once I had researched and I had an idea of how my magazine cover should be set out, I could start creating a draft. This research helped me to decide where I am going to position each different magazine convention on the magazine cover. When designing this draft, I had to think about the different conventions of a magazine cover.

The conventions I included on the cover of my magazine included:

Banner: Front page headline which goes across the full width of the page.
Splash: Main story of the front page accompanied with the headline and a photograph.
Masthead: The title of the magazine at the top of the page, it will be big and bold.
Kicker: This is a story designed to stand out from the rest of the page by the use of a different font and layout.
Lure: A small section of the story is printed on the front page of the magazine and the full story is inside the magazine.
Headline: The main heading and the biggest font and related to the main story in the magazine
Date Line: Shows the date the magazine has been available from/ issue number
Cover Lines: summaries of the most enticing features and articles which are inside the magazine
Barcode: Shows the price of the magazine underneath.

I first started with the banner, as this is allocated at the top of the magazine cover. Underneath the banner I placed the masthead of the magazine. This shows the titles of the magazine and has to stand out to catch the readers eye. In the centre of the page, I placed the main image, this image has to relate to the main story and must stand out from everything else on the page, it had to be bold and interesting. Now I had positioned the main compositions of the magazine cover on the page, I could work around these and place my lure, barcode, kicker, cover lines and date line.

Today's lesson will help me and save a lot of time when I start to create my actual magazine cover as I know where I will have to place everything on the cover of the magazine.

Below, you will find the first draft I made in today's lesson: