Putting Together the Magazine Cover

After editing my chosen image for my magazine cover, I began to bring it all together and pull in all the other important components of a typical magazine. Firstly, to create the white border that is very commonly used on 'Film Comment' magazine issues, that was my inspiration for this ancillary task, by just simply cropping the image to a scale that I was happy with.  To make sure that the picture was the right size to allow the masthead and cover lines to fit, my next step was to create and size the masthead.
I entrained from my research that on the recent issues of 'Film Comment' magazine, the actual two words are placed together as one word, however they are differentiated with two different colours, with the 'Comment' being a colour drawn from the main image to create an overall colour scheme. I found this very effective and so looking at my main image, the obvious colour (as a lot was silhouetted), was a kind of dark gold/dusky colour of the floorboards which stand out. This was the colour I decided to correlate into the title.

After this, I added the cover lines above the masthead in a minimalistic way, which is another main feature of film comment that I really liked. I chose a similar font to the one used within film comment which I kept as the font for all the text on the cover to allow it to look professional and particular to that magazine. I tried to pick cover lines that were recent and the most up to date as possible for the time which is what a typical magazine would also do.

Next, I saved an image of a barcode from the internet to place in the right hand bottom corner, as this looked aesthetically more professional and also this is where the majority of bar codes are placed on film comment issues. Another typical feature I added to go with the barcode was the price and the date of the issue.
This is what my final result.

The last stage I had to do to bring the whole magazine together was to write a main cover line to anchor my main image. I know from experiences of reading magazines, that there is usually a play on words which related both to the theme and the image and so I researched further to gain inspiration for how I should go about doing this. I wanted to further tie in the colour scheme and set out to make a small section of the text that same gold/dusky colour that I used on the masthead. I finally came up with 'Into the Darkness/Holly Radford in/The spine chilling/Lullaby'. As the image was mainly silhouetted and our storyline is held in a haunted apartment, I thought 'into the darkness' was a good phrase to bring this feel together and these were the words I decided to make coloured.

Overall I found this process quite easy due to my past experience with photoshop, however the tricky and tedious part that I found difficult and time consuming was creating and colouring the masthead.