Cover Development

Developing the Cover for the magazine was a key element of the project. It had to be grabbing for the audience, but actually appealing to them. I wanted to have an image that was relevant to my double page spread on American Sports in the UK, but wasn’t sure whether firstly it would alienate the audience or if would I have the resources to take an image that conveyed my themes. In the end I decided to keep it simple, taking inspiration from Time Magazine covers, where the main image is a facial portrait.

So my concept was to have a generic American football player on the cover just looking forward at the camera. I looked for some time for a place I could borrow or use an American Football helmet but this wasn’t possible. To show the audience what I wanted to convey I would use the classic “war paint” sun block that football and baseball players wear in America.

With the concept ready I took a range of shots, asking a friend to pose for me, wearing a sports top with padded shoulders to give the effect of an American football jersey with protective pads. I took photos of different poses, such as a dead pan face, a smile, a scream etc.

I chose the scream shot as I felt it was the most powerful. The next step was to take it on to Photoshop, separating the model from the background. I then Desaturated the image (turning it greyscale) as I later planned to heavily contrast it with any colour on the page. However, this made the image slightly flat, especially with the relatively low camera quality of the original image. To give it a little bit more depth, I ever so slightly changed the “Curves” of the image. This tool lets the user precisely decide how light is used on the page, manipulating the Input and Output  tones. This just gave the image a little bit more “pop” than before.

The next step was painting on War Paint (as my model had refused to put it on). After using a range of different, brushes, layer blending options, layer styles and artistic filters to try and make the stripes of paint look real. However nothing was really working. I had to figure out a way to work around the unrealistic war paint (as without them there is no way to identify it is an American Football Player). 

I took inspiration from a music Video, where when the singer screams, an inky stylised sketch of the singer is layered over the actual footage. I took a similar concept for my main Image. Using a downloaded set of custom brushes for Photoshop (which I had from previous out of college project)I took my image, and using the colour selecting Eye Dropper tool, took a colour from the image, and then added an exploding paint brush ink blot coming off of the picture. This gives a cool effect, giving more fury to the screaming football player, and justifying unrealistic colour. Lastly I added yellow stips to the jersey. This once again gave more pop off the page to the image which was dearly needed.

When deciding layout, I sketched ideas firstly before developing prototypes on the computer. While I had a general design concept, I needed to make different variations to find the style most effective and appealing to my audience. After handing out a questionnaire with 3 different designs, my results showed me to take my original concept, and take some from other designs, namely the “sidebar” on the left hand side. With the image and design finished I compiled them on screen.

In Photoshop I first added the Vector Layer of my Logo (becoming a vector smart image in Photoshop) as my masthead, and then got onto the design of the side bar. This was made of a black rectangle and then the information as well as my “symbol tagline” for finger on the pulse. These were separated by the “CMYK” colour dots which I had used in the Contents page, as it was important for me to keep an ongoing visual style throughout. With my image now placed at the far back of the image, everything else laid over the top.

A problem I had here was that dense black from the image made the masthead unreadable. As it was supposedly a new magazine, I couldn’t afford to put the image over the mast head as the brand isn’t known. To tackle this problem I place the masthead on top of the image, gave it a thick white stroke and a drop shadow. This made it look good and also successfully separated it from the image.

I then put up the various sub-headings. There was a problem with original layout as the subheadings were on top of each other like this:

Sub-Heading
Sub-Heading

This made it hard to identify whether topics were related or not. So I differed slightly from my original concept, placing them in completely separated  sections of the page. I also wanted to use a sticker effect. To do this, with a ellipse tool I made a circle (keeping the dimensions using Shift and Alt), gave it a white stroke and a slight drop shadow, then warping the shape of the circle to look like one corner has not been pulled down. Next, I separate out the effects layers from the layer, and then warp the drop shadow, under the unstuck section. This part has text over it look like part of the sticker.

Finally, I wanted a background to the image of the football player; something that suited the visual style of my magazine as a whole. Once again I was looking something with "pop" and a pulsing energy to it. After trying different things such as tares through the page or pulses, I decided to use the grid used in the contents page. Then with multiple Cyan, Magenta and Yellow circles, each with a Darken Blending option I created a line of colour blobs behind the player. Although not particularly relevant to the subject, it was suiting to the style and gave the extra level of visual interest I was looking for.

Now I just had to group things into the proper layers and place everything where it needed to be, allowing room for print errors around the side before having my final Cover.