Editing my Product

1) Below is the first thing I started off with. An A4 sheet of paper and my image. The shot in particular is a medium close-up, centre image. There is lots of room at the top for a masthead and a good amount of space either side of the centre image for cover lines, plugs and etc.

2) The next step was creating my masthead. The picture below shows what I first came up with. "BYTE" was the name I was happy with and I knew I wanted it to be bright and bold, however there was something that didn't look very professional about it.

3)  I had a look online at well-known magazine and noticed that a lot of their mastheads have shadows. So I added a shadow my double clicking the "BYTE" layer on the layer palette and going to "Drop Shadow" where I played around until I had created a shadow I was happy with. The image below shows my new and improved masthead, with a shadow. 

4) The next thing I wanted to add was a plug. I drew a large red circle to the right of my model but again I felt it wasn't enough to just add text and move on. This can be seen below.

5) To increase the attractiveness of my plug I drew another, slightly small circle but this time in black and put it in the centre of the original red circle. The red circle then acted as a boarder and I felt it definitely made my Plug look less ugly. Below this can be seen. 

6) The last step to creating my plug was adding text. I entered the text "WIN AN iPOD" as it was short and I would therefore be able to make it larger in my plug to catch reader's attention. I played around with font and colour and decided to make the text white and in the style of Bauhaus. I then went Edit>Transform>Rotate and rotated the text in conventional plug fashion. The finished plug can be seen below. 

7) The next step was my cover lines. I shall only talk about the editing process of one cover line because the process is obviously very similar for all of them. My first cover line was called "BILL GATES: THE DROPOUT BILLIONAIRE" I inserted a text box and used Copperplate Gothic Bold font and decided upon a size of 18pt. This can be seen below. 

8) Again, I feel this doesn't look very good. It didn't stand out like a real magazine cover-line would so I decided to add a shadow to see the difference. I also moved the cover line from its current place to the left of my central image. This I feel was a triumph and can be seen below. I adopted this for all my cover lines and added shadows to all of them, except half are white and Copperplate but the other half are red and Capharel Pro.

9) Below are all of my cover lines. I edited them in very similar ways to the one above. 

10) The next thing to consider was my sky-line. I didn't want the name of my college magazine to be misleading so I decided upon "Your Personal Bible of All Things Student." It spans from left to right of my masthead. It is Fixedsys font. It can be seen below. 

11) The last things were minor details such as the price and bar-code. I found a picture of a bar-code online and imported it onto my file. The price consists of a small yellow box with text in it that says "£2.99" My finished product can be seen below.