Movie Magazine Front Cover...

As with my movie poster, after I had looked at magazine covers from Empire Magazine and Total Film, I got an idea of how to layout my cover and what to include. As well as the research, after I had finished my movie poster I decided that I wanted my magazine cover to look similar to my poster, as to show a link between the cover and the poster, and to get people to buy the magazine if they recognised the style of the cover and the film. I then decided to do two different covers, one in colour, and one in black and white, then ask my friends which one looks the most effective.

From the photos I took for my poster, I decided to use the ones which involved my main 'actors' standing face on and back to back. I chose these photos as they looked the best suited on a magazine cover and they would match my poster seeing as there is the same background and they are wearing the same outfits. 

From there I starting doing some with the photo showing them standing face on, after a couple of try outs I felt that it didn't look right, so I then decided to use the ones where they are facing back to back. This looked a lot better than the other photo and looked more professional. 

My first drafts involved me using the same background as the photo, after a few copies, I decided it didn't look right. The first draft of my magazine didn't look right for me. I chose to keep the background as I wanted to keep the

magazine cover and poster the same or at least have them linked. I then chose a red, black and white colour scheme for the text as I felt that it worked best with the bold, green colour of the background. For my title, I decided to go for a themed font, and found this movie reel type font which goes perfectly with the theme of the magazine. 

For the cover-lines, I researched the latest news headlines, and chose the Oscars as they were fairly recent, and decided to include a round up of this years biggest summer films as I didn't really know what else to include.

While doing my first cover, I decided I would link it in with my poster. I did this by using a black and white effect on the poster, but keeping the foreground coloured. I did some research and noticed that there are a few magazine covers which do this. I thought it looked okay, but the background made it difficult to read the text. I didn't want to change the text colour as I felt this looked conventional.

I also decided to change the font my film title uses. I felt this looked too tacky and did not look professional. I wanted my magazine cover to have all the conventional features but look like it has come off the shop shelf rather than look rushed. I also decided to that I needed to change the background as it didn't look right. After more research I saw that very few magazine covers use outdoor backgrounds and most use gradient coloured backgrounds instead, so I thought I would try this myself.

So, following on from changing the colours to black and white, I then decided to experiment with plain backgrounds rather than using the original background. I also changed the colour of some of the text to make it easier to read. I found that it looked a lot more cleaner when using a plain background. Here I haven't got all of the features of a magazine as this was more of an experiment, a try-out to see what a plain background would look like. 

I think that the colour scheme needs to be worked on and that I might change the colour of the background to black & white, again to link this cover to my movie poster, the layout needs reorganising and in order to do that, I will research movie magazine covers and look at how they organise the layout of their information.   

This is my final magazine cover. I have kept the colour scheme to grey, white and red, used a gradient background of black and white, I also used a different photo this time as the other one didn't look right in the end. I felt this photo was more appropriate for magazine covers. I used a sans serif font, more specifically, Arial Black for my cover-lines as it looked clear and bold, good for getting the attention of the reader, I used a cursive font for the main text, I decided to use this type of font as I had seen it on other magazine covers and thought it looked effective. I have a slogan, issue number, date, website, price, bar-code, additional information and a unique selling point which is that my magazine is a blockbuster special issue, highlighting all the big movies coming out this year, this gives people a reason to buy my magazine and therefore read it. I like this layout a lot more as it's cleaner, professional, effective and almost matches my original plan. The text works better with the new photo, and the colour scheme works well with the background. I have also added some anchorage to give the main image a meaning and link with the main cover-lines. I felt that without it it looked bare, but also didn't make sense. 

I am now 100% happy with how it came out, I like how the text came out, how the colours work well with other and that you can read the text easily, the image of the actors work well with the positioning of the text and most importantly it does't look like an image with text posted on top, it looks professionally done.   

Since making this post, I have made a few adjustments based on the feedback I received.  In brief, I have added more photos to balance out the use of photos and text, corrected spelling mistakes, and altered the date.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Final version of my magazine cover after audience feedback.