KEY TERMS: technical conventions, main cover image, main cover line, coverlines, pugs, plugs, insets, captions, masthead, fonts, language, tone, register.
Even if you haven’t got your cover model photo, you can start to mock up, draft your front cover using your masthead design.
Find an inspirational cover and use this as a guide.
Create cover lines, insets, captions, main cover line, pugs and plugs as well as the barcode, price etc.
Remember to find the right tone, language and register for your coverlines, main cover line as it is important that you speak to your target audience in a way they will understand.
Look at other examples of magazines, blogs, vlogs to find exciting headlines etc.
Find the appropriate font for your genre and have some fun laying out the draft front cover.
You should then be able to fly in the final image and perhaps just tweak and amend some of the layout, but the hard work will have been done.
If there is a font you really like from dafont, you can download it into the special P drive folder – name it with your name.