Making The Front Cover

To make my front cover I used a photo of Hard-Fi because they are going to be my main feature for this issue. To do this I took the most eye-catching photo i had and cropped it first to make it fit onto an A4 piece of paper.


This is the cropped version of;






This gives me the background for my front cover, i am using one photo on the front cover because that is what I have found to be the "norm" for most music magazines after doing my research. Once i got this photo I looked at the different colour effects that I could use, I decided to enhance the colour more to make the picture bolder and more colourful, this did not make it any less defined just brighter, which I feel made it more eye-catching.


I had not sorted out a logo or name for my magazine once I had this photo, so I made that my priority, I thought of many things that were relevant to music to play around with the words, such as;

CD, Tape, Radio, Sound, Speaker, Instrument, Record, Gig, Concert, Venue

After playing around with these words I came to my final choice of having "Broken Record" as my name.

I then needed a logo, I deiced to use Paint on the computer to design one, My first idea was to have a large B and a large R with the words after each other, but after trying this it took up a lot of room and didn't look very eye-catching. I then had the idea to have a big B and R with "Broken Record" underneath it, I couldn't manage to tilt writing on Paint so i wrote "Broken Record" on when editing the front cover on PhotoShop

My final logo is;

I saw on different magazines I had bought there was writing over the pictures in different colours, I didn't like the idea of having different colours because I am sure i want Black Blue and White as my colour scheme, I then had the idea of a slanted black text box and writing for the features. this worker very well. I then added a black circle at the end of it to round off the edge of the box, I feel that this gives it a different effect which makes the cover look less solid, it also works well with the wire and microphone rounded at the same angles.

To include other features in the magazine I put a black box at the bottom left of the front cover to include smaller features such as; An album review, Bands to reform in 2009 and The Weird and The Wonderful.

To make my bar code I looked up pictures of bar codes on Google, took notes about how they were laid out, the size of the bars and where abouts the numbers are and how many there are. I then designed my own bar code on Paint.

I also added the details of the issue into a slated black box at the bottom right hand side. This includes the issue number, the price and the date of release.

The final outcome;