Front Cover Mock Up

This is my flat plan (mock up) of what i think my magazine front cover is going to look like. My inspiration for the layout of the magazine comes from the magazine 'VIBE' which is also a hip hop magazine that includes all the latest hip hop news and trends. After looking at 2 issues of 'VIBE' magazine I have managed to recreate my own layout which I think will give a sophisticated look to the front of my magazine so readers find it easy to navigate the magazine front cover and see which cover line represents the cover photo and so on. Instead of using a typical banner across the top of my magazine I will be using a strap line which is a bit different to conventional music magazines but after doing my research I discovered that a strap line is fairly common on hip hop magazine like VIBE. I think that the strap line is a good feature because it will further attract readers to want to discover more from the inside of this magazine. I have decided to implement this into my design because it will leave room on the rest of my cover for my cover lines to go and will not over crowd the page.

I will be making my masthead solid block capitals and the colour of the font will have a gradient overlay that fades into a transparent colour so that you see the background. This is an idea that I have seen on multiple issues of vibe and I think it gives off a really nice effect. The cover line that will be aligned right will be on the right hand side of the page and will be aligned to this side to correspond with the side of the page that it lies on giving off a real sense of sophistication and a look of professionalism as almost every magazine using this technique in the industry. The main cover line will also be a bigger font size to the cover lines that lie on the left side of the page. This will suggest to the readers that that this cover line coincides to the main cover photo and will therefore be one of the main stories/articles in the magazine.

One thing that I have chosen to do is to keep text to a minimum on the front cover because this will make my front cover look over crowded and will take the focus away from the main cover photo and this is something that I do not want to happen. After doing research I also found out that most readers like to look at the picture so I do not want to include too much text and make the ratio of text:images too big. This is because most people often pick up magazines to have a quick glance at the images before further reading into the articles and stories.