BLOG MONITORING:

In the last couple of weeks, I have been developing my front cover. In my flat plans I portrayed an image of a girl crying and holding a barbie doll, but as this image didn't turn out as well as I'd expected, I had to put one of the photos from the DPS in its place. I am still working with which one of two I will use as I am having trouble with the visibility of the words on the subject and the backdrop. I finally decided to use the image of the girl holding the barbie doll as it has space at the side of the white/cream backdrop to place the sell lines so they will be visible.

As I was placing in the sell lines on the front cover I realised that having too
many different fonts as it looked very miss matched. I decided to go with a sans serif font that was similar to the one on the front of Cosmopolitan as it was simple and suited my target audience. Instead of changing the font, I changed the size of the text, having the main headline big, then the sentence explaining or asking a question underneath in a slightly smaller font. I also found it difficult to match colour to the text and it still looked very mismatched. I then realised that professional magazines, especially my target audiences favourites Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Elle and Company all do a strobing with the colours e.g. red black white red black white etc. This created continuity and at the same time was following the three colour rule. I decided to do the three colour rule with black, white and the baby pink I had already started using as my main pop of colour. As you can see here, I strobed the colours, putting the colours accordingly to suit the background. i put the lighter colours white and pink over the skin of the model sop the were more visible and the black across the light background.

My model had some imperfections on her face on the day of the shoot, for example redness and spots. Covering these up proved to be easier than I imagined and the heal brush tool matched the cover up perfectly to her skin surrounding the imperfections. I also covered up some hairs on her forehead and covered a few freckles on her arms. I wanted to keep a bit of shine on her face to show some realism to the photo; I didn't want the photos to seem too unrealistic or unreachable.

At first, on the title of my front cover I had a very sophisticated serif font that I tried to match with one from inside of vogue. I realised that it looked far too sophisticated and expensive, something that I didn't want, especially since I was aiming to reach for the lower socioeconomic groups. Therefore I changed the font to a sans serif font that was sleek and modern which would suit the younger audience I was also aiming at. I used the eyedropper tool, which picked up the colour, font and size of text and changes the selected text to the one that had been selected. This was helpful for my DPS when I wanted the headers of each of my paragraphs of my article identical apart form the actual words.

I used the eyedropper tool in In Design, which picked up the colour, font and size of text and changes the selected text to the one that had been selected. This was helpful for my DPS when I wanted the headers of each of my paragraphs of my article identical apart form the actual words. It creates continuity and looks neat. This was the result:

I used drop cap on my first paragraph so the audience have a clear understanding of where the article starts and to break up the text to make it looks like there was less writing. I also found that most professional magazines use this in their article. Image it baby pink to make it stand out even more and so it would link to the colour of my title and the front cover.