Music Magazine Contents Page First Draft - Step-by-step

As you will soon see, there were much fewer steps involved in the creation of the contents page than there were in the creation of the front cover. This is due to the fact that the contents page is made up mainly of text, and since text is very easy to edit one doesn't need to save their work quite so regularly as when working with layout and images. I did say before though that there are going to be a lot of changes, so chances are there will be many more production steps after the ones shown. Before the actual stages though, I am going to show the rough contents ideas/plans that I drew out and scanned in:

Although I had actually already applied effects in Photoshop to the main photo a while before deciding to use it, I shall try to remember in detail what I did to it. I know the main thing I did was pump up the contrast and brightness. I also experimented with lighting effects, but only applied very small ones as they made too much of a difference otherwise. I also changed the exposure, offset and gamma correction settings. The overall combination of these effects made the picture's background mostly completely white, whitened Kerry's face and made less thick strands of hair appear as a sort of yellowy light, and despite my lack of technical image terms I thought all of which looked pretty cool. I then just had to cut around Kerry using the lasso and then put the picture into a contents page-sized canvas.
Now the image had been sorted I next decided to put a smaller version of my masthead at the top left of the page, so as to reinforce the idea of a house-style/brand identity. Next to it I put a date and issue number to comply with music magazine conventions; I also made the font they were in Oceania which is the same font used for the masthead. I added a caption for the photo which would tell the reader what story the picture relates to and on which page one can find out more. I did this because from my music magazine research I saw that nearly all photos on the contents page have a caption such as this, and so my having one would further allow me to abide by music magazine conventions and therefore make my magazine look more realistic. At this point I used the Calibri font, due to its simplicity which made it unobtrusive and easy to read. The final thing I did during this first stage was add a "Features" heading, since as can be seen from my plans I had already decided to separate my contents page into the three categories of Features, Regulars and Reviews.

Here I added the other two section headings of "Reviews" and "Regulars". I changed the font for these and "Features" from Tahoma bold to Lucida Sans Typewriter; the reason for this was that I felt the Tahoma bold font became too fat-looking when made the text a bigger size, and when I took off the bold it looked too skinny. I tried a variety of different fonts and found that Lucida Sans Typewriter looked fairly similar but wasn't what I considered too fat or skinny. I then changed the font of the photo's caption to Lucida Sans because it was just as comfortably simple as Calibri and also meant that I wouldn't have to use too many different fonts, since that could have made the contents page look tacky and unprofessional (my research showed that music magazines try to limit the number of fonts they use unless they're going for a specific feeling, such as scary or happy). For this same reason I also used Lucinda Sans for my page number, my Kerry Anne heading and my story summary. I noticed that on both the Mojo and Q contents pages the cover story is labelled "Cover Story" so as to separate it from the rest of the features and draw attention to it. I decided to do a similar thing for my contents page, which is why there is a box with "Cover Story" written in it. I used red on black since they were both colours already present on the contents page (which is good for reasons similar to those about not using too many different fonts) and it manages to catch the eye, and that is after all the point of having it. The layout I had begun to instigate is fairly similar to the top left possible layout on my second page of rough contents ideas.

The change here is that I added all the contents page text. As you can see by comparing it with my first page of rough contents ideas, a lot of the things on there were either the same as or adapted from what I had originally planned to write. There were also many things that I had come up with during the production of the front cover, such as Rockability and Leanne Bell, and these I needed to include to retain the continuity between the things on the cover of a magazine and the things on its contents. I moved the "Cover Story" box down so that it was between the page number and Kerry Anne, since I felt that in its previous position it was wasting a line of space and also just looked a bit awkward. I had to erase some of the nice yellow effect around Kerry's hair to make room for the text as I felt that placing the text over it didn't look very good. I then had to arrange each line of text individually to make them fit around the picture.

For this final stage I made only very small changes in a somewhat futile attempt to make the contents page more interesting. I thought that another photo could spice it up a bit, so I placed one where it would not affect the layout too much and where it would be relevant; this photo ended up being of an old man next to "The Good Ol' Days" section. It is relevant and doesn't affect the layout, but despite this still looks pretty bad. I also, as said in the last blog post, desaturated the photo to make it appear older. I tilted it as well to make it more interesting. To make room for the photo I had to Kerry Anne caption to the left of her picture; I actually preferred this to where it was previously as it utilised what was previously empty space.

Main Task - Music Magazine Contents Page First Draft

This is the first draft of my contents page. I feel that there is a lot that needs to be done on this, though to be honest I am not yet sure what. That is why I posted it here on my blog, so that people might be generous enough to post constructive criticisms with ideas about how to make it better.
I shall first talk about the things I do like. I feel that the image of Kerry dominating the bottom left of the page is very effective, and I like how she seems to be looking at the caption about her. I also like how I've made the text wrap around the main image, so that no space is wasted. The final thing I like is the different coloured page numbers, which I did to make it clear that they were separated. The colour used for the page numbers is the same colour I used for some of the text on the cover, and this should help slightly in maintaining a house-style.
Now for what I don't like. Somehow, despite being pretty much completely filled up, the contents page looks quite empty and boring. Perhaps this is because I used too much text and not enough pictures, so for my next draft I might try making the font sizes smaller so I can compress the writing together more. I tried to make the page a bit more interesting by having a picture on the bottom right; I used a picture of a man from my Mum's work as he is old and an old man is relevant to the article "The Good Ol' Days". I desaturated the picture to add to the feeling of oldness. Despite my efforts the contents page still looked boring, but now it was boring with a random old man on it. Something else I don't like is the date and issue number at the top right. I included them to comply with the conventions of all music magazines, but I think that they don't look very good. I considered and experimented with putting some kind of coloured box or circle around them to make them more appealing, but alas, it looked even worse, which is why there is no frame now.
Anyway, criticisms and ideas: throw them at me. Thank you.

Main Task - Music Magazine Cover Second Draft

This is the second draft of my cover.
I noticed from the comments on the first draft that many people found the yellow/orangey text blurry and therefore hard to read, I thought this strange since in Photoshop the text looked fine. After playing around with it a bit I found that the blurriness was due not to the colour, but instead due to the file format I had uploaded the first draft as. The JPEG format that I had uploaded my first draft as is not a very high quality container; it is usually only used more because of its smaller file size. It is acceptable for things with only images (which is why digital cameras use it as their preferred format) but text is often unclear. PNG is a much better format since, despite having bigger file sizes, it allows for much much higher quality images, especially when text is used. This comic adequately conveys my point. Anyway, for my second draft I uploaded it as a PNG, so people should no longer have a problem with the blurriness of the text.
Now for actual changes. Firstly I removed the extra eye make-up I worked so hard on since despite liking it I received comments that it made it look like there were slugs under Kerry's eyes, or that it looked like she had an eye infection. Although there were other people who said they liked it, I had to admit that it was more than slightly dodgey.
Next I changed some of the artist names on the right hand side, since (as Nathan commented) "Joseph" didn't seem a suitable name, and "Wilmore" sounded too much like the surname name of a Lord. Because the new names I chose were shorter I was able to move the "Plus" section to the right, which meant that the text imposed less on the photo of Kerry.
The final change I made was including one of my album covers, since some people had said the magazine from a distance looked like it could be a women's health magazine, and so I tried to music it up. I thought the Leanne Bell cover was my best one, which is way I chose it to be the one to include. I therefore had to change the text in that section of the cover from Medusa Rider to Leanne Bell, so the album cover would be related (it would be pretty stupid for a music magazine to have a random image on the cover that is not relevant to any of the text). I gave the album cover a white frame and a drop shadow so that it would be clearer against the background image. I also tilted it slightly, so that it looks more interesting and more like something that would be on a real music magazine cover.
I am very happy with this, but am still prepared to make any further changes should the need arise (for example, if a real band called Space Grind tried to file a lawsuit against me and I had to change that particular band name).

My CD Cover Designs

As stated in my last post, I had decided to design some CD covers which I may be able to use on either my contents page or double page spread, or even on a later draft of my front cover. I came up with the three covers posted below which I made in Adobe Photoshop, but before condemning them please consider that I was trying to experiment and I am likely only going to be using one of them, or two at the most.

The first cover I did by using the magic wand tool with different tolerance levels to cut out the girl from the background. I removed the colour from the picture and then applied a rainbow gradient effect at 50%, so that it overlaid the background and the picture of the girl but so that the picture was still clearly visible. The reason for applying these effects was because I named the album "Not Always Black and White", and placing a rainbow colour scheme over a desaturated girl is obviously relevant to such a title.
 
For the second cover I applied some slight lighting effects, but went for a much simpler design overall. I didn't feel that anything would be gained by using snazzy effects, and so left the photo pretty much as it was (though cropped down of course). I used a white font as it mainly went over the girl's black hair and white is clearly visible on black. I used the font Harrington as it looks elegant and sophisticated, and the photo seems more in fitting with this. I noticed from the album covers research that the band/artist name is usually much larger than the album title, and I took this into account and applied it myself.

For the third and final cover I cropped the photo, but then decided the picture looked a bit boring by itself. I began to experiment with the different filters in the Filter Gallery until I found one that made the image look more exciting, but still suitable for an album cover. I eventually found and applied a filter called dark strokes, which made the image darker and blurrier (but in a good way) and gave the image an overall gothic feel. I'm not too happy with the background, font or album title, but this particular cover was meant mainly to test out different image effects. One interesting thing I did do to the text was to position each letter of "DEAD" individually and apply a tilt to each one. I personally quite like the slightly comical effect it gave, but whether it was suitable for the image I'm not too sure.

CD Cover Research

I decided that I would try and make one or two CD album covers to put on either my contents page or double-page spread. I thought it would be an effective way to add more factors to my magazine to emphasise its musical-ness. The following are covers which I collected off the internet and thought to be relevant. I particularly looked at covers showing the faces of females, as most of my photos are of girls' faces.

Music Magazine Cover First Draft - Step-by-step

Throughout the design of my front cover, I made sure to save my progress regularly. I did this primarily so that I could go back and change it if I had changed my mind about something, but it also meant that I'd be able to post on my blog a step-by-step account of the cover's creation process. The step-by-step account is what you'll be reading now.

As Confucius said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." This was my single beginning step. I basically just brought the picture I'd decided to use into Photoshop, and then put the masthead design I'd made earlier onto it. I then cut out the top of my model's head and made it a duplicate layer which I placed above the masthead layer; this made it look like my model was standing in front of the magazine title. I next put some text saying "Kerry Anne" on the cover, as this is the name of model and therefore the name I was going to use for the "singer" on the front cover. I also put a barcode I found on google in the bottom right hand corner, as this is a common position for music magazines to put their barcodes.

For the second version, I first made the masthead more thick and bold so that it would stand out more. I also got rid of the "Kerry Anne" text, since I decided to focus on editing the main picture and designing the cover before worrying about adding text. Another thing I did was change the barcode to a more realistic one.

This I did for a bit of fun; I used the colour replacement tool to make Kerry's eyes red. I found it quite effective as it definitely made her appearance scarier, but I knew that it was not the kind of thing the one should seriously include on a music magazine's front cover.

This is the third version I made. The most noticeable change is the black header bit, which I added as I have seen it on many music magazines. I found it useful aesthetically as it meant my magazine looked more music-like, and I also found it useful content-wise as it allowed me space to include more information about what's inside the mag. Separating the black box from the background is a small silver-coloured line, which I put there as it matches the silver colour of the masthead's outline. In regards to the masthead, I changed it by applying a drop shadow and mucking about with its other settings slightly so it looked clearer and therefore more professional.

In this fourth version I had hidden all the things on the cover apart from the main picture, so that I could cut out the background. I decided to cut out the background so that I could apply another better one, rather than having the random wall that was in the photo's original background. On many music magazine covers I looked at a coloured background had been applied, so I thought I could create something similar to these covers by adding in a background colour myself. Obviously at this point I had yet to cut out the background completely. I used to lasso tool to do the main section of cutting, and when it got to the finer details I used the eraser tool with a very small and soft brush setting.

In the fifth version I showed again the layers that I had previously hidden. I'd finished cutting out Kerry but the edges of the picture still looked sharp and jagged, making it clear she was cut out, so I rectified that later on. I chose to use a yellowy orange background for the moment as that was the colour of the wall used as the actual background and so I felt it fit the picture quite well. It is also not overly obtrusive to the eyes, though I did feel that it looked quite ugly. I also actually added something to the black heading. I used white text, because white always looks good on black, and included a picture of the "three middle-class schoolboys" in question. As you may remember, this was actually one of the pictures from the first session of photo taking so I am glad I was able to use it. I put a small white frame around the picture so that it would be clearer against the different things it is in front of.

For this sixth version I had changed the colour settings of the main picture slightly, so that Kerry looked less pale. I also spaced out the text in the header section better, so that it properly filled out the space. I added in a month and price as they are aspects needed on music magazine covers just as much as barcodes. I used the font Oceania as it was the same font used for the masthead, and it therefore helped to create a sense of house style.

This is probably the point at which the biggest (or most obvious) changes took place. For this seventh version I got rid of the ugly yellowy orange background and replace it with white. I then used the gradient tool and dragged a white and black gradient inwards from the outside edges of the cover, which made the outer parts of the cover black fading into white at the centre. This gave the effect of a picture taken with a light shining on a white background, where the black parts are the shadow. I made this effect more obvious by going on Filter > Render > Lighting Effects... and then applying a spotlight effect with the angle pointing downwards. This made it look like a light had been shining directly on Kerry's face when the picture was taken, and this gave the picture a much more studio-like quality. I also moved the "Kerry Anne" text to the left and put it across two lines, as in its previous position it felt like it was taking up too much space and therefore limiting what else I could include on the cover.

For the eighth version I applied a much more even gradient to the background since previously it looked kind of random, with the bottom left hand corner having a lot less black than the bottom right hand corner. I moved the whole image of Kerry to the right slightly so that her name was not obstructing her face so much. I also put the lure ("I'm done with the band...") underneath the name, to show it was said by Kerry Anne. However, what was by far the biggest change I made did this time was the addition of make-up. I wanted to make Kerry look more "rockish" and thought a good way to do this would be by adding more obvious make-up. I looked up on youtube a variety of make-up application tutorials, eventually finding this one and this one, both of which proved to be extremely useful. Female musicians often have bright red lipstick and I managed to, with the help of the first video, create what I thought to be a pretty good effect. I applied also a black eye-liner effect using the second video; I chose black as it is gothic and "rockish", which is the effect I wanted to create.

In this ninth version I only changed a little. I compressed the "Kerry Anne" text and the lure below it, so that they were spaced out less vertically. I also changed the drop shadow settings on the lure, making it so that the shadow was actually directly behind the text. This compression and drop shadow editing made the text easier to read, and it also looked better purely in terms of aesthetics as well. The only other change I made was to cut out Kerry's head as I had done earlier and put it over the masthead again.









And here is my tenth, and final, version of the front cover. Here I added all the text to the cover, which wasn't too hard since I had decided on most of the band/singer names and their stories beforehand. I put all the band/singer names in red, as this highlighted that they were more important than the accompanying text. To be honest I have no idea why I chose to use for the accompanying text the same particular yellowy orange colour I had earlier deemed too ugly to use for my background. Regardless, I think it works quite well, and I believe it compliments the red text quite nicely.



It is likely that there will be further changes for me to make, but this is only my first draft so I have the time. Also, I apologise for the hideous layout blogger has deemed fit to impose on this post. I tried my best to sort it, but to no avail.