Magizine cover

In the last few weeks my class has been running workshops on Photoshop and other programs which will be useful in the production of our coursework. This is an example of many of the techniques learnt, put into practice. As you can see I chose cosmopolitan as the magazine which I wanted to emulate. My thinking behind this was that it had a simple layout which will be easy enough to re-create. However we had to work within set pictures and only a few of which were suitable for cosmopolitan, all of which already had backgrounds to them. This meant that by picking a magazine with a constant background colour (commonly white or pale blue) I had made it much harder then necessary.

After cutting her out from her background I had to crop the image above her waist. This helped to desexualise the image which is more suitable to cosmopolitan readers. However this made the image to small for the background colour, this meant I had to enlarge the image of the girl and therefore slightly blur her (this is most obvious around the eyes) fortunately I believe this isn’t noticeable enough for me to have to replace the image.

As for the colour layout of the page I chose black and pink for two reasons. First of all they are contrasting colours and therefore seem to stand out more when you alternate them like I have. Secondly this is a colour pattern which is commonly used in cosmopolitan. However there are a couple of exceptions to this pattern. First of all there is the “I got burned by the details” sub-heading. I chose to do this heading in red so that it stands out more then the other headings as it goes against the pattern, however looking back it I’m not sure if it was the best idea. The end of the word burned and the by seem to blend in with her skin tones. If I had the chance I would go back and apply a white outer glow to it like I did with the writing opposite it. ‘Jessica on what she really wants’ has a black outer glow on it in the hope to stop it blending in with her shirt. Although it seemed to work at the time I didn’t look at it proper size and I now believe I should have made it bolder.

There are a few aspects of this work which wasn’t covered in the workshops however I believe they work well in this context. For example using a slide to simply make a box then applying text to the top of that is an example of how the layers worked with my piece. Then applying a drop shadow to that box (as well as the heading of the magazine) gave the appearance of it coming of the page, this in turn makes it more eye-catching. The use of specific numbers in surveys ‘17 ways to know he’s cheating’ is commonly use in magazines this gives the impression that this is all the possible ways as it isn’t a round number. Changing font to one which looks more like handwriting makes it seem like that article was specifically written by that person and therefore makes it more personal to the audience.

I am aiming at a specific audience for this product. This magazine commonly aims at females between the ages of sixteen and about thirty. I believe that my product also relates to this group the most obvious representation of this group is the age of the women on the cover. Although it could be argued that the model should have been British but I believe this works well anyway. This magazine supports Anne Cronin 's media theory of 'compulsory individuality'. People can relate to this magazine cover because of the varieties within it therefore they can choice between representations to pick the one which best represents them.