In this blog I have my interpretation of a magazine front cover. We had to try and replicate the front cover as best as we could with the fonts and the design of it in particular. This is what we call a Swede. We were introduced to a software called InDesign which I had never heard of before so it took a bit of time to get used to it and know how to use the tools. We had a lesson where we watched a tutorial on how to use some of the tools such as fonts, shapes and colours, and were then left to play around with it ourselves. I now feel I have learnt the basics of how to use it. The task helped me to learn how to make all the different conventional design features of a magazine such as, masthead, main cover star, main cover line, cover lines, plugs, pugs etc.

I was given the magazine front cover below to try and recreate. The main cover star for this particular magazine was an artist called ‘Mia’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Even though my image isn’t the best quality I managed to find the correct image to for this magazine but we were told that wasn’t the main focus of it. The main focus was the text/font, structure and layout of the front cover. My swede is on the right of the real front cover.
• I found a few things challenging while completing this task of recreating this front cover. The most challenging thing for me was finding the correct/most identical font for the magazine and for me I didn’t manage to find the closest font to fit this. Another thing that I feel brought down my front cover was the quality and view of my image. The exact image wasn’t on the internet so I used the next best thing which was the same image just taken from a longer shot. The image was also very pixilated but this wasn’t the main focus of the task so it wasn’t our main priority. Another thing I found quite hard was the spacing between the letters/words. This made a big difference as I didn’t manage to figure it out so it isn’t what I wished it to look like as some fonts aren’t correct either.
• Although there were many challenging things there were some aspects of this task which weren’t as challenging. As the colours featured in the front cover were quite clean and simplistic it wasn’t a problem find the correct colours to meet the real cover. Putting text on the page and moving it around if needed without any problems with barriers was also quiet simple as it was similar to other software’s I have used. Another thing I found less challenging was inserting images onto the page. I figured out how to do this by being shown on a tutorial and was an easy process to follow and learn.
• After watching some tutorial’s and having a weeks worth of lessons to play around with the software and recreate a real magazine cover which is read by a lot of people. Even though my front cover isn’t perfect I managed to create a front cover that I feel resembles it enough which has given me some confidence that with a bit more time I will be able to create my own Music Magazine to a good standard when the time comes.

Here are some tutorials to help me improve my skills on InDesign: