Designing the basic idea of a background and experimenting with photos

Once I knew I wanted a more personal front cover I found an image on the Internet of what I wanted mine to look roughly like. I then made a quick practice front cover.
This is what I came up with:I knew that there were many factors which didn't work with this picture, however it gave me a good idea of what I was aiming for.

Before starting any official designing, I decided I needed to take a variety of pictures which could be the main feature on my front cover. I knew that I wanted the pictures to seem natural and "in the moment." In order to get this effect I just simply took many pictures around my school with a variety of groups of friends. These are some of the pictures i took:.

After looking closely at each of the pictures I took, I decided that the format of the last two shown were most effective for my style.In the end I chose picture 3. I chose this one as I felt it would be the most interesting to experiment with on photoshop. I knew I could delete the background and just focus on the people.


Once i had picked the photo I had to decide on a style of background for my magazine cover. I came up with two ideas. 1) a simple colour with a contrast colour as a border or 2) a pin board effect with all content on the cover to look as though it is pinned to the board.

I couldn't decide which I thought would be most effective. Instead I created a rough draft of both formats.
Firstly,using photoshop I cut out all the background of my picture leaving just the models.
I then found a suitable font and created a 1 version of my front cover.

I immediately saw that this wasn't very creative and didn't portray a believable magazine front cover. I decided to start experimenting with my second idea.

Firstly I took a picture of my plain pin board.
I left some pins on, on purpose to create a realistic background. This picture is very dark and bland. Using photoshop i edited it to make it more bright,bold and cut out the white background. This is what i created.

This gave me a structure to start creating my magazine cover.