How I made my magazine !

Front cover • To begin with, I gave the page

a black background. Then it was to dafont.com for the title, it took a little time to get the right look but I think I managed to pull it off quite well with the tall “I”. It was simple to make the “I” as all it involved was cutting a long segment out, copy, paste then group it all together.

• The red splats are from brusheezy.com, where you can simply download them for free, these were arranged down the left-hand side in accordance to the rule of thirds. I think they contrast well with the dark background and became the main house style.

• Because I started my production without taking any pictures, I had to do a little bit of guessing in the first lesson or two. But as soon as I stuck them in I rescaled and cropped them to fit the page better.

• From then on in, it was mostly coming up with cover lines and messing with strokes and scale.

• I made sure that all the colours were either red, black or white to keep with the house theme.

• The sky line and the bottom cover line get a fancy fading black box’s by using the brush tool and carefully going across the page.

• I then added a random barcode from Google images!

• Most of the finishing touches were just cosmetic, as I played with colour schemes and the position of my cover lines.

• I upped the brightness and the exposure of the photo in the background because it was too dull compared to all the bright standing out colours on the rest of the page.

• I added the all important ”slogo” and placed it where the date and issue number used to be. Said text was shrunk down and tucked away in a corner because it is WAY less important than everything else on the page.

• And that was basically it, except for the final one I made the sky line shorter so it wasn't hugging the edge.

Contents page

• Right, contents.. The first thing to stick a bit black background on there and the huge title, using the same font as the front cover, with two different strokes.

• Afterwards, a huge text box with yet another stoke to fill with content-like goodies !

• And to finish, at this stage, I applied a healthy load of brush splats.

• Not really worth a whole slide, but progress, for progress sake.

• All I did here was to add the picture with its title and the black splats.

• There’s more to talk about here!• I introduced the second picture.

Which is just the image from the cover but cut out with the magnetic lasso tool, with two strokes as usual.

• I added a page number to the title at the top. And the picture under it had the same problem as the one on the front cover. So, I scaled it up and increased lightness and exposure to make it more consistent with the colour scheme.

• On these two screen shots, basically, I added the page number and started working on all the actual contents text stuff.

• With the smaller image I though would be a good idea to use the greens as I have done on the feature double page spread, to give it a visual link.

• Here I have just added more contents and page numbers.

• And here I added lines to divide up the different articles and generally re-shuffled them until they all fitted nicely within the text box.

• To finish up, I change the colour of the smaller title from green to white. Later, just before publishing to my blog, I decided to re-do the smaller image. Cut it out again, sharpen it, and remove the green stroke so it went better aesthetically with the rest of the page.

Double page spread• Last page!• First thing I put in was the

text box, copy pasted in my interview straight from word in green. The box’s stroke is the same green, the brush splats are the same green.. I can see a trend!

• The title included using the same font from dafont.com that I used on my CD cover from my preliminary project. This was then made the same colour green, given a black stroke and black brush splats.

• Not a great deal going on so far, seeing as at this point I didn't have the background picture..

• There is more going on here!• With the picture finally taken,

I could bung it in as the background. And with some re-scaling it fit nicely giving the impression that the drum is more important than the person as he is in the background and out of focus. Which thankfully was what I was trying to achieve!

• I added columns to the text by cutting and pasting from one text box to another. Then changing the font from green to white and using red for the questions.

• The only other thing I did here was to add a picture of the band’s CD cover.

• After a slow start, I went into over drive and did a major re-work on the double page.

• I removed the old title and gave it a MASSIVE new one which is also black, with a green stroke as before but without the splats in the background.

• I made the CD cover bigger and moved it two the top corner, only after re-shuffling the text to make some more space.

• I removed the sub-heading from the title and also made it “MASSIVE” and arranged them to be parallel with the title.

• Last screen shot!• I gave the title a thicker stroke to make the page

appear to be more even, with an equal amount of green on each side, also the subtitle. I changed the stroke from green to white so it stands out better from the background.

• My background image (like the other pictures) was dulled compared to the vibrant colours, so I upped the exposure and lightness to get it to fit in better.

• Last things I did was to add a credit line for the photographer, writer and I made the U in the text a lot bigger so it stands out ! Done!