Designing the Front Cover

Here are some fonts that I am currently considering for my front cover. I feel that the best fonts are those that are not cursive. This is because mostly they are unclear. However, I am still toying with which to choose as I need it to represent the magazine clearly, yet I still want it to be relatively simple as that is a main theme for my front cover. 

I quite like this idea, but as seen in a previous post I really want to have a white background to keep the page really clean and different to other magazines out there. 

I really like this design as I feel it combines enough images and information to keep the page clean and still have enough to make it not seem empty or boring. I think that by using colourful images it will allow for a contrast with the white and capture my targets audiences attention. 

I like this design but I don't think it would be suitable, despite it's structure and difference I think that it would be too busy for the look that I want to go for. 

Having planned this I then went on to source the images I wanted for this rough idea. 

Originally I wanted to use this image and cut it out to use it in the bottom right corner of my front cover. However, it was not a good enough quality image and though I was disappointed I began to search for another image. This was one in serious consideration: 

As well as a few others, but in the end I decided that I liked this one the most. 

Source 

Having chosen my image, I then cut it our using photoshop so that it looked like this. 

I'm pretty happy with the way this image has turned out and am hoping that it will look really good on the final design. 

For the second image I decided that I wanted to use a blob. For this I wanted to have a stamp image as the main bit and overlay it with text. So I searched for stamps, here are the ones I decided to use. 

Having found this image I then preceded to cut the a few of the clearer ones out. Here were the choices.

I think that the best one for my purpose is the second one as it is a nicer shape and I feel with hold more text and be more pleasing to the eye than the first.
Having placed the first few pieces of furniture on the page I decided to insert a background as the there was a little too much white space.

This was the image I chose for my background and I felt that this looked really nice on the page making it appear less empty than it previously did. However, it does slightly... drown out my logo and I feel that that needs to be rectified. 

I am still unhappy with my designed logo, so I began to look through the fonts on my computer and found one called Eccentric Std. This I felt really went with the travel feel because it reminded me of the font on passport stamps. Using this font I began to experiment with the rest of the page, using the green on the featuring suitcase to link all the elements together. 

I am much more comfortable with this version of the cover and I really like the ideas of simplicity and yet sophistication that I hope will interest my target audience. I think that this font and the colour of it is more suitable to the younger target audience as it is large, bright and not overly elegant.

Unfortunately having printed this out the subtitles and the subheadings were revealed to be too small and difficult to read, this is a big problem because we want the page to be seen and not ignored amongst the other brightly coloured travel magazine.

I was given the idea to add some more red to the front cover as the splash on the suitcase was eye catching and contrasted with the blues and greens of the title and the background image. I wasn't very happy with the out come as I had hoped as I still didn't think that the text was very clear and I couldn't find the right font to go with the bright colour. So I began to experiment. 

I was originally given the suggestion that I should turn some of my font red. I didn't partiularly like the idea in theory as I wanted the front cover to like to the feel of adventure by using greens to connote a countryside feel and I didn't think that red would do this. However, having been really unhappy with the front cover above I decided that I needed to do something drastic so I took the advise on a whim and decided to shorted the longer titles so that they fit with the others, just being place names. I also extracted the red with the eyedropper tool on Indesign from the more shadowed section of the suitcase, so that the red was darker than originally used when the sub-headings were red and the headings green. In order to include more of the Bell MT font (used for the subheadings) I made the "Win a trip to..." text the same, keeping that font the blue from the fourth suitcase. I similarly made the issue no. and price text the same colour and font so that it linked together nicely. I am now a lot happier with my front cover and I am glad I made the decision to use the red.