Final Magazine Cover

Here's the final magazine cover:

Peer Assessment/Evaluation

Here are the RAG sheets we used to peer assess each other's blogs and get feedback from:

Criterion C: Magazine Creation

After applying the picture of the final product as a background for the whole page, I decided to just layer different features of the magazines on top. First, I started off with a bright line of colourful paint drips at the top of the page as a base for the title of the magazine – the extra splotch of colour adds to the eye-catchiness of the magazine cover meaning that it would attract a lot of people’s attention if on sale.

Next, for the first half of the title I added an interesting looking icon that says ‘the magazine’ to one corner of the title space at the top, seeing as it could act as almost a logo for different branches and magazine editions of a publishing company – something I remember from my investigate task is that always having a symbol that readers can recognize your magazine and identify it with will make it stick in their minds, adding to the visual appeal for customers to buy.

Then, I found a sports magazine title that had a font that fit into the theme of the magazine cover so far – I then spent a little bit of time repositioning things on the cover and changing the colours of the writing and logo in order to make the whole thing not too overwhelmingly colourful, but to still stand out against the background.

For the next step, in order to make the whole thing appear a little bit more sporty, I used a few rounded square-edged icons portraying different sports from the logo of ‘MultiSport’ magazine, and changed the colour to match the rest of the theme, positioning it below the before now minimalist title to make it seem a little more decorative.

After that, I decided to add a few pop-out shapes coming from the edges of the magazine to advertise my product. I chose an eight-sided star, and rotated it diagonally, positioning it so that it stood at the corner of the page, not blocking the actual product. I made it a pleasant but bright blue colour to match the pool theme, but to counteract the bright colours used near the title, and gave it bold whit edges to pop out. Next, I added a statement inside the shape, making it sound like it was promoting the product, yet still not making it look like an unprofessional advert on the ront page, but instead as if the product were a new discovery in technical innovation, as if it featured in an article inside the magazine.

Then, make it look more interesting and serve as a base for the name of the company that makes the headphones, I found a blue-green ombre abstract flow design and put it next to the star callout. Next, I wrote the name of the brand – ‘Aquaris’ (a name I’d planned since the design) – along with a promoting slogan and next to a simplistic yet interesting looking logo I created for the brand out of three white circles on Word.

For the next step, in order to make the cover look more like a magazine and less like and advert, I added mini text boxes and chose a fitting font to write short phrases to feature articles written inside the magazine, along with page numbers. I stuck to a colourful yet good-looking blaack and hot pink theme throughout. Since it is a sports magazine, I made all the articles sports-related, even adding one about an interview with famous Olympian, Michael Phelps, and his ‘secrets to success’, seeing as this would appeal to budding swimmers, as well as making them recognize the product along with the magazine, effectively promoting it.

Following this, I added magazine-type elements in the same font but different colour (white) displaying the price, the date and issue number of the magazine.

For a final touch, I decided to make the product stick out by adding a hot-pink text box atop the star featuring the headphone article and typed in “ALL-NEW” in a bold white font inside it as one pop art element to make the magazine stand out in a store where it would be sold.

Criterion C: Final Product

Here's the final product:

Criterion C: Product Creation

Firstly, what I did was search for pictures on Google Images of swimmers or sportspeople that were posing in such a position that I could use them as a front cover model for the headphones on my magazine, and so that I could build the product around them. These were a few pictures I considered:

I chose this one, seeing as it was a close-up image of the swimmer’s head, allowing me to model the headphones in detail and slightly bigger than they could’ve fit on another one of the swimmers in other pictures. Also, the angle that the headphones would fit on her head would allow me to display majority of its features on the side with the most prominent functions of the headphones. In addition to this, seeing as the product is aimed mainly for synchronised swimmers who are typically female, having a female model would help attract the target audience’s attention

Next, I found a few different types of headphones that I could use as a template to build the advanced features of my design on. Here are a few of the options I looked at:

I experimented with a few of the headphones on the model, and finally chose the lime one, because it looks very realistic and the green suits the cool-coloured theme of the background picture. I superimposed the images of the headphones onto the model using the app ‘P-Blender Lite’. It allows you to import photos, remove background using two different tools (one a colour remover, and the other an erasing marker that you can adjust the span of and guide using your own fingers to erase the specific parts of an image that you wish to remove), rotate the image, and then import another photo of your choice behind the foreground photo and adjust position of. I inserted the pair of headphones I wanted ‘on top’ of the model’s head by in fact removing its background and then inserting the model behind it. I then spent a little time readjusting the photo behind the headphones and clearly remove-backgrounding the edges to make it look a little more professional.

Then, I used an app on my iPad named ‘Frames Delight’. It is a photo-editing app that allows you to adjust features of a photo such as brightness, colour contrast, saturation, warmth and etc. I utilised it to adjust the photo so that the edges of where I ‘photoshopped’ in the headphones onto the picture blended naturally and the picture didn’t look fake but instead realistic, as if the image were taken with the swimmer actually wearing the headphones.

Readjusting the photo required for me to increase its warmth, meaning that although the editing is well disguised, the photo colour quality is poor as that made it a bit yellow. I imported this photo into an app called ‘PicArt’, in which I added a mild filter to the picture to bring out its cooler-based colour scheme.

Next, I imported the photo back into ‘P-Blender Lite’ and used the marker tool in a medium size to remove the center bit of the earmuffs on the headphones that held the Beats logo – now this leaves me space to build the screen of my product on the headphone after imported it to my laptop.

 Before continuing on to work on my laptop to finish creating the product, I did one more thing. I needed to find an image for the screen of my headphones – their design was fairly similar to that of an iPhone screen, except they had a voluem icon where the home button is. So, using an iPhone image that I found on Google Images, I imported it into ‘P-Blender Lite’ and then used the large size marker tool in order to remove the area where the home button was and then inserted a volume icon behind it, adjusting it so that it fit into the image perfectly, while at the same time blending in well due to the faded, soft edges that the marker tool offered.

 After importing both these images onto my laptop and into Microsoft Word, I positioned the edited iPhone image on top of the headphones where it’s supposed to be, then rearranged the pictures so that the iPhone was behind the headphones, showing through the transparent part that I removed, and so that the pictures were layered on top of one another perfectly.

Finally, to finish off the product, I downloaded four images of the icons that wee to be displayed on the app screen along with the ‘song option’ icons such as pause, play, stop, fast-forward and rewind played around with them for a bit, rotating and resizing them so that they all fit on the screen, and then finally grouping all of the pictures together to create one larger picture of the product as a whole.