Photos and photo editing

I chose to have a white background for all my photos so as not to distract from the person/people featured in it. I used Adobe Photoshop when experimenting with the lighting for the background of my cover. This was to try and make the image more dramatic and to make the subject look more exciting and powerful. This was because I wanted the subject to be an artsist of around the same standard and reputation as Alicia Keys and by looking at previous covers of Q magazine when Alicia Keys was featured on the front she was wearing her hood up looking slightly dangerous and powerful. This was different to all the other times a female artist was featured on the coer of Q. This is because the magazine has a bigger male audience than female so female artists were rarely featured on the front and when they were they were in quite revealing and suggestive shoots. By doing a cover of a female with her hood up I think it helped to widen my female target audience. I also gave her slightly smokey eye make up and lots of jewellery to help make her look more glamorous, like an icon. When editing the lighting i used the 'render' section and then had the lighting coming from the top left corner to alo enhance the glamour and status so she would appear possibly on stage.

On the contents page I did a couple of passport size pictures of the female artist again. These related to an article that was to be featurede in my magazine that was supposed to be an in-depth and revealing interview with her. These shots were of her with different expressions and posses which were supposed to start showing the differnt sides to her and be like a preview of the article. I also featured a picture of the band 'The Koalas' which were going to be used for my double page spread, I chose not to do any lighting affects in this phto but I just made the background white again .

On my double page spread - an interview with the band, I chose to use five pictures. these were two group shots and 3 single shots (one of each menver). For the three single shots i used a passport style photo again, similar to the photos i used on the contents of Lilly Jackson. these were medium close up's (much like real passport photos) and had each member pulling a different silly expression. Each member was wearing casual but stylish clothing and pulling a funny face or bemused expression. This was all to try and show the nature and personalities of each band member. The only affects I used on these pictures were to increase the pixelation as I didn't want the pictures to look air brushed as the band members were meant to be very down to earth people.

need to upload pics

Flat Plans

• When designing the flat plan for my front cover I chose to draw out two ideas. One had a medium close up shot of a female artist on the front with a hood up. The other front cover shot I did was a full shot of a band of 3 males, they were standing in a diagonal line at different heights all pulling a different facial expression to give a quirky effect to the cover. I chose to use the cover with the female artist on the front as I thought it would help to appeal to a bigger female audience. The only other main difference between the two covers was the amount of space taken up by the title. The cover with the female on the front had a smaller title and I thought this would be another reason to choose it as I didn't want all the attention drawn away from the main sells as the title would be the same on every issue.











• When designing the flat plan of my contents page I tried to make it similar to a cork board/scrap book. I chose to do it this way because when I looked at other contents pages for similar target audiences (Q and MOJO) they seemed to have lots of different sections on the contents page and as I am aiming for a younger target audience I thought I would exaggerate this more.











• I tried to keep within my target when doing the flat plan for a double page spread, I did this by looking at magazines such as 'Q' and then adapting their style to make it appeal to a more female and younger target audience. I did this by making sure the article was broken up with pictures and that the pictures were all different sizes and styles to make it more interesting to look at. I also tried to make sure the double page spread was set out in a more creative way with different parts a different angles so it wouldn't be like a newspaper article.

cant find other cover at the moment? :S