The Cover

I had many ideas for the front cover of my music magazine. One of these was to have a group pose in front of some graffiti. After analysing each of my ideas, I decided that this was my favourite and most suitable for my chosen genre and demographic. Next I chose to develop the idea before beginning my very own photo shoot. I invented a 3-piece girl group consisting of myself and two of my friends. I chose to dress my models in extremely bright colours with quite a funky attire. This again reflects the personality of my chosen audience. Once I had sketched out a few poses and overall layouts for my cover I was ready to begin the actual shoot. Luckily for me, I live very locally to Alexandra Palace, which has a well-know skateboarding park.

On the walls of this skateboarding park are various graffiti designs sprayed by the general community. I was already aware that this was there, however I was not entirely sure about its present appearance as the walls are constantly being re-designed. Taking this into consideration, I walked up to the location to see if it was suited to fit the design brief for my cover. I was pleased to discover that it was bright, colourful and full of style. Next, I got two of my friends to accompany me to the location and asked my sister to take some photos. Although it was her to take the photographs the shoot was dircted by myself. I was very happy to find that the shoot was a success as I was left with a selection of winning photographs to choose from.

After analysing each photograph, the one that I decided to stick with was a capture involving all three of us positioned at different heights, creating the visual affect of levels. I tranferred this image to Adobe Photoshop CS2 and begun my editing. After adding an initial heading, title of magazine and other aspects of text to the cover, I re-assessed it and started to develop the overall image. I used guidelines to ensure the individual sections were all in line with each other or lined to some significance and with the use of layers, made the fragments ordered and placed correctly. I tried various layouts and designs for my cover and finally after a long and hard process, created the look that I was aiming for.