Magazine Cover Conventions

Hey guys! So, for my class this week we had an assignment to make a magazine cover in order to get familiar with the process and using InDesign. It's pretty similar to the assignment we had last time with Primere Pro. So, here is some of my thoughts throughout working!

Learning:

As someone who collected a few magazines of my favorite things when I was younger, learning about them and their conventions was really interesting. I realized that much like the conventions found in films, everything has a purpose and the small tricks they use to market even worked on me. 

Nowadays I don't really get magazines anymore, but I remember standing in lines with my parents and seeing ones that caught my 10-year-old attention instantly. One I specifically remember was a magazine decked out in my favorite comic book heroes, which I immediately pulled to read about the creation of them and their story just like it said on the front before begging my parents to get it. The same bright yellow text that I remember now being something I learned was more than just "visibly pleasing" but a tactic in disguise.

Making The Cover:

Picking a Genre

Right when we first got our assignment, I knew which genre I would want to lean into, music. Making the issue not what should I do but figuring out how I would go about narrowing down the huge genre to make it slightly easier on myself. In the end, I choose to do my magazine on Rock music/artists.

Bringing it to Life

(Colors)

Being that I had chosen Rock music to be the main focus of my magazine, I knew I would have to implement a theme to help portray it and grab attention. Right away I knew that my first choice would be to focus on a color palette of black, red, and white. After some research I realized that these three colors were the main and most frequent colors to show up when looking at anything Rock related.

(Photo)

As for the main focus, the cover image, I knew I wanted to make the center focus to be an electric guitar. This made the process of taking pictures a bit tricky because I had to experiment with different poses and angles to get exactly what I wanted even though I didn't have a specific image in mind, just an idea.

(Basics)

After getting the overall theme I wanted to go for figured out, it was time for me to add the fundamental things found on magazines, such as the masthead, barcode, and dateline with sell price. The masthead, while it took a bit to think of a title for my magazine that would suit well, wasn't all that tricky to style. I wanted the word to feel "loud" on the page, not just because it was the title, but because guitar amps (which is what its symbolizing) are loud and what blast the awesome sounds guitarists play. As for the other attributes, the only real thought was where I would place it, besides that, they were straightforward and simple. I found tucked away to the left bottom corner to be my best luck.

(Media)

After all of that, it was time for the main details: Coverlines. I knew these would be the hardest to come up with but, once I had my feature article, "Rock Legends of 2025", everything else came relatively quick. For styling, I knew I had to make the feature article pop so it wouldn't blend in with the rest of the coverlines. For this, I decided to change the color to red to make it stand out. This was a similar process I did for my red banner at the bottom which mentions an "exclusive with Elvis", where I changed his name to black so viewers would immediately be dragged in seeing the famous name.

Takeaways and Future:

While I don't think I necessarily "struggled" with anything to a great amount, I will say a lot of things in this assignment required trial and error till I got it just right. Playing around with placement, fonts, boldness, and even size were slightly tricky. However, this was only because I didn't know which I liked best, not because I found the act itself challenging. And now that I've done this, I feel a lot more confident in this being a possibility for my final portfolio.

FINAL RESULT: