Front Cover First Draft & Feedback

This is the first draft of my music magazine. 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 as I looked at other pop magazines and my genre is pop, it helped me to understand what I need to do to ensure that my magazine appeals to my target audience. 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. 
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 reader’s 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 barcode, cover lines and date line etc.

Front Cover First Draft:

Feedback:

Your first draft has been analysed very well, I think you just need to think about a few things when you're actually creating your front cover, using Photo Shop.

I think you need to ensure you use your front cover research and research a few other POP magazines, and see what conventions they use to attract their target audience. If you are only using one main image, you need to justify why you're only using one image.

What content are you going to include in your cover lines, you need to make sure you don't include to much information as this won't allow the main image to stand out. You also need to ensure that the font styles you use are consistent throughout your magazine to ensure that the magazine looks professional.

Are all of the buzz words necessary or do you only need to include a few? Also, make sure that the content included on the banner is necessary to the magazine, if your genre is POP; you need to make sure that the content on the banner is related to POP music.