Final Magazine Self Portrait Cover
This is my Final Self Portrait Magazine Cover design.
I am very happy how it has turned out. It has changed a lot from my first plan but the main features have stayed the same and it does exactly what I wanted my magazine cover to do ie it grabs your attention with the title design. the letters blend into the border of the magazine which is quite an unusual effect. This really drags your attention to the image. The colour theme (black and white with red headline) also works well and has an interesting while simple design. The main photo is edited well and combined with the line from the letter K it has the effect of dispersing into the shadow.
I describe the development of my magazine and how I got to this final finished cover, is described below.
Creating my Self Portrait Magazine Cover
Below is the first plan I drew for my self portrait magazine cover. I planned out the basic style I wanted and where I would place the main title what my main look would be clothes wise. I made a decision t this stage to change the spelling of my name from Rocco to Roko. This was because I wanted the cover to be named after me but I felt that Roko looked simpler and cooler and more right for a magazine cover.
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Scrolling down the page shows how my magazine cover changed and developed from its first plans to the final piece while I played around and experimented on photoshop seeing how the different ideas looked.
This was the first plan I designed and edited on Photoshop. It was very basic and had many problems with it. However it did have the key things I wanted. It had the title that I used for most of my magazine cover examples, just in a different font and it did have a slight boarder just not as much as I would use in other examples and the final piece.
This was a slightly different look as I really was pushing the unusual style and trying something quite radical, having the title and header of the magazine at the side It just looked wrong and didn't work and the confusion of the word London makes it look like the name of the magazine is 'London' However I did do another example of this more successfully,.
This example is where I developed the idea of the letters of the title extending right out into the border. This is quite an original idea, I have not seen it done but I was really pleased with how it looked and knew straight away that that effect would stay in the final version. I used a different photo and lighting in this version, leaving it darker but still looking looking very clean and simple. The titles positioning looked professional and magazine like. It was a big improvement from the first magazine cover I had made and put me a step closer to designing my final magazine cover with a photo that worked best.
The lighting still needed some adjustment and improvement. It also needed some text about the magazine.
Here I tried out having the title a bit further down like many magazines have. I made the text size a bit bigger and positioned the text more centrally. Again the lighting needs improvement as it is too dark. I need to brighten it up lightwise. I still need to add text describing the magazine and its content. I do really like how the text seems far away from the photo of me It gives the magazine cover a visual interesting look that possibly the photo is almost fish eyed or curved to create this look. But it is just the illusion of the text combined with the photograph.
I then went on to design this magazine cover which I really did like and felt a lot of things were working with it. Overall though, I thought there was a bit too much going on and it was it was a bit too complicated. I positioned the title back in the corner again and that worked but in general the cover didn't quite do the clean simple but catchy look I wanted for my final piece.
