Magazine Cover on Adobe Photoshop

Our task this lesson with James was to create the front cover of a film magazine on Adobe Photoshop.

I wanted to create something different and dynamic looking so I decided to go for a black and white colour scheme. I then decided that my film magazine would be a magazine that reviewed short films and so named my magazine 'Short Review'. We'd talked at the beginning of the lesson about the importance of fonts (typography) and how it was crucial to have a font that people could read, for example, it's a bad idea to write an article in a script font as it is very hard to read. Script fonts are usually used for either decorative or emphasis purposes. With this in mind, i designed the look of my magazine. My title contained two fonts, one word was block-like font and the other a handwritten-looking font. I then had to decide the content of my magazine. I ended up deciding to feature filmmaker Luke Snellin on the cover as I already know about him and his films (I've done a review of his film, Mixtape) and because I follow him on Twitter, he has agreed to answer some questions for me to put into the magazine spread we are designing next week. With this all in mind, I designed my magazine cover and this is the result:

 

There is a lot of white space but I think that this provides a strong contrast to the image of Luke Snellin which highlights that he is the main feature of the magazine. The black text around the picture is also highlighted by the pale background. While I think that this is ok for my first attempt at a magazine cover, I don't know a huge amount about Photoshop but I'm sure with more lessons, my final magazine for my ancillary task will look a bit better than this. 

The following lesson, we continued this task by creating a magazine article to go in the cover we had designed. I wanted to continue the same original look and I have produced two different versions of my article as I am not sure about the pictures behind the text...