Brief Mock Up Of Front Cover And DPS

Front Cover Mock Up:
As I have not taken the pictures yet for my magazine, I decided to plan out a rough draft for my front cover of my magazine, to show the type of layout I am going for and play around with the different fonts and features that I could include on my first draft. I know it looks VERY bare at the moment, but this was mainly a start to experiment with the picture on the right hand side instead of central, to see which I preferred, as well as giving me something to do whilst waiting for a sunny day to take my images and start with my first draft. I think I will try and take a few pictures, in a variety of poses and then choose which one I prefer represents the music genre best. The colour scheme I have used, were basically to test out which colours went well and what didn't. I will probably not use these colours, as they are not the best contrasting colours, so I'll try and stick to a 3 colour scheme that work well together to appeal to my target market. What I do like about this mock up, is that I found Colbie Caillat font that she uses for her album covers and used in on my page. I believe this will help my target market recognise the artist I will be mentioning in my cover lines. Therefore, I will try and keep to this idea in my first draft. The only down side to the font I've used is the one advertising the promotional gift doesn't stand out as much as I would have liked, and therefore, I will used a shape to make the burst grab the readers attention on my front cover.Looking at the sell lines on the cover, I think I would like to include one more on the left hand side, as it seems rather bare, but then again, I don't want to make my front cover to crowded, so I best keep that factor in mind.


Conclusion:
At the moment, this is an extremely rough draft of my front cover as it is too bare, with a lack of typical conventions you would see featured in an acoustic magazine. My next steps, when creating my first drafts will be to:

• include original pictures of my model on the front cover, instead of a well known artist
• have a quote by my model to draw the attention of the reader to find out more about the article
• try to keep to a 3 colour scheme of good contrasting colours
• a tagline/slogan for the magazine
• more Coverlines, preferably about well known acoustic artists that would make my target audience want to read the magazine
• show the price, barcode, issue somewhere on the cover

Double Page Spread Mock Up:

Again, I have used pictures from the internet for the time being, to show the layouts that I am undecided on at the moment to help me figure out which one I prefer. I thought I'd do a extremely rough plan of two layouts that I will try and re-create when I take my photos later on, as I'm not entirely sure which one will look best until I edit them. I'm almost positive that the image of my model will be to one side of the page, but I haven't decided whether the picture will stretch over the whole page or half of it and the other half as the text. Although they are still rather plain, I tried to include the main concepts of having the title of the artist, first stand included as well as the page numbers and columns of text. I released on my second mock up that pull out quotes are typically used in music magazines and therefore, I will try and include this in my DPS.

Conclusion:

Even though, there isn't that much to annotate at the moment, the bases of these drafts have helped me realise numerous of things:

• to keep the same colours used on the front cover the same, as continuity is key!
• used a pull out quote as they help intrigue the reader to find out more about the article
• have at least two columns of text so it is enough to inform the reader, but not too much that is bores my target audience
• include a stand first to introduce the artists being talked about in the article - again another device to grab the readers attention
• use of colours is vital - so pictures taken on a sunny day so be taken into consideration!
• page number must be included so the reader can navigate easily to a certain page