Making my First Draft of my Double Page Spread

I first began to make my double page spread by opening up the image that I want to use on Photoshop and using the eraser tool and the pen tool to remove the background. I tried using the magic wand tool to do this as it is much quicker and easier but there were quite a lot of features in the background that I had to edit out so the magic wand tool would have been even harder to use for this image. I then made her lips a brighter red to contrast more with the genre of my magazine. I did this using the brush tool to go over her lips and then I decreased the opacity of this so that it looks more realistic.

I then placed my image on to Microsoft Publisher so that I could place my article on it. The reason why I decided to do this on Publisher rather than Photoshop is because on Publisher the text falls around the image and you can change the layout of the text into columns, to make it look more professional and to follow conventions of double page spreads. Photoshop does not do this which makes it much harder to do as you won’t get very accurate columns and if you change part of the article it will effect the whole layout of the article. I also placed a vertical line down the centre of the page so that I know where the pages will fold.

Next I placed my title/pull quote onto my page. I found a font that I thought linked well with the rock genre and I decided to make some of the words bigger than other to make them stand out and so that it is a bit more interesting and diverse. I also rotated my title slightly as when looking at existing double page spreads I noticed that quite a few of them have their title on a slant and I thought that it looked very nice like this so I decided to do the same with mine.

After that I placed my article onto my double page spread. I used a drop cap at the beginning of my article as this is a convention of double page spreads. I also used different coloured fonts to separate the text, making it easier to read. For my question and answer part of my article I put the question in red and the answer in black so that they are easily separated. I also put the answer in italics to show that this is a quote from Black Ray. I also increased the size of a quote from the article and changed the colour to make it stand out.

Also I placed a bit of information next to the image saying who the photographer of this image is and information about the outfit that my model is wearing.

I then added a bit of colour to my design because I thought that it looked quite plain and boring. I added some red rectangles across my double page spread by going under shapes and selecting rectangle. I also added some red squares in the corners of the pages, using the same tool, and placed the page number in the two squares at the bottom.

Then I added the name of my magazine next to the page numbers so that the reader knows what magazine they are reading. I also think that this makes my magazine look more professional. I did this by copying and pasting the title off the front cover of my magazine.

Finally, I thought that the title looked quite boring so I placed black rectangles behind some of the letters and changed the colour of these letters to white. I think that this looks very effective as it still matches my colour scheme but it makes it eye-catching and it draws the reader in.