Music magazine cover planning

Before I was able to start creating any part of my cover, I had to plan it all out. I firstly started my planning by deciding on a name, which was easy as I had asked my target audience what they thought my magazine should be called; once receiving my results I picked the best three out and chose my favourite one. I then went on to planning the layout of my cover on paper which I was then required to pick the best one and sketch it up in publisher. Once I had completed all of the above tasks I then went onto more detailed planning of choosing my font styles and colours. The images below are of a photocopy of each of my sketched which I completed on paper:

The image to the left was my first draft copy that I completed for planning how my cover should look; however I don't like the layout of this design at all because I don't think I've included enough cover lines on the cover, also it has a lot of blank plain spaces, which will make it look unprofessional and boring.
However this is the reason for doing more than one draft design on paper because my ideas expanded when I started designing, I also took into consideration how other magazines had designed their covers.


 

The image to the left was my second draft plan for my front cover, as you can see this one is a different layout for everything as I don't have any cover lines covering my image and I have shown more detail into the size of my cover lines, also I have included more conventions on this cover, as I have a badge type  item in the corner which includes the price inside of it, to attract the audiences attention more. However I still don't like this layout because I don't think I should just have all my cover lines on one side of the cover.

Again this is another draft version of my planning for the cover of my magazine, this time I included more cover lines on the magazine because I didn't think I was including enough on all of my other designs. However I don't like the layout of the cover lines because I don't think it would be a very clear formatting to view the cover lines if they are diagonal. The position of the bar code isn't positioned very well because I now don't think that it should be at the top of the page, but at the bottom because I don't want attracting a lot of attention from my audience as it isn't the main focus of the magazine.

The two images either side are my final draft copies, I firstly designed it on paper like all my other copies, because this was my final version designs I had to create a publisher copy of it. I choose this design to do because I felt that this was my best design as I had reviewed all the covers that I had analysed and took a design idea from just about each one, the reason for me doing this is because I then knew that my magazine would look like an actual one.



Once I had decided on what layout I would be using for my magazine I then started planning the font to use for my masthead and cover lines. I done this by writing my masthead out in different fonts in bold and a large size, I wrote next to each sample the name of the font in a smaller size to see how it would look as a cover line. Once I had decided on my font I then started creating a draft version of my cover in black and white, I done this for when I went to create my real cover I could just use my draft one and change it to my colour scheme and add my own image that I had taken. I created my draft version as though it was my final cover so that when I created my cover and got feed back I would only have to do little changes to it. Below is a image of my font samples and my draft front cover: