The final looks, layouts and fonts. Inspiration is key

I put together a mood-board containing covers of magazines that appealed to me. They hold such appeal because of their stark contrasts and that they all seem to be in the 90s or shot to look like it. I want to take this across to my own cover maybe trying manipulate my photos so they appear older to fit with the 90s hip hop movements.

The fonts especially are what draws me to a cover of a magazine. What the best part about creating a magazine cover of you own, is that you can borrow aspects from covers you have previously seen. You can recreate colour palettes, reword cover lines, recycling and uplifting old work giving it a refreshed and reinvented feel, giving out a new meaning or idea. I believe a layout of a magazine cover is just as important. You don’t want crowded clumps of information thrown in your face, you want catchy, slick captions and cover lines to really snatch the audience’s attention.

More specifically, I quite like when the cover model’s head covers part of the masthead and the magazine is so known that it doesn’t even need to be completely shown. In turn, I like the basic colour palettes throughout the front page then having the masthead a bold combination of colours across a gradient. I feel this is an expressive and tactful way of giving a front cover that wow factor. I will most probably use the bright backgrounds like the cover of “BRICK” and “SOURCE” contrasted to a stern looking rapper with dark coloured clothing. This contrast is satisfactory because it makes their facial expressions, accessories and hairstyles stand out so much more compared to shooting on a black background.

Taking in to consideration key aspects like my cover model and the graphics within my magazine, I would like my model’s expressions and stances to match the tones of my colour palettes and to relate to my chosen graphics.

Moving outward and onward, the knowledge that you can borrow from absolutely anywhere in media creating I feel will help my work to come across more refined, more considered and definitely more genre appropriate because taking any inspiration requires thought in that you have to consider how it will slot into your vision.