Comparison of First and Final draft Front Cover

 

In this post I will be discussing the comparisons between my first draft (on the left) to my final design (on the right). When making changes and editing I kept referring back to my questionnaires and surveys that I underwent.

To begin with I have changed the size and the effect of the master head. I defiantly wanted to keep "RELIC" name in front of the artist as i feel like that is the most important feature to the magazine and how it will become recognisable to the readers. The name is the crucial element therefore it would remain in front of the artist. However when undergoing my questionnaire the audience felt like the name was covering up my artist face and put them off in buying the product as they felt it was "too harsh" having the name on top of their face and it seemed they just had an overall negative effect to the placement of the name. To evolve my draft I therefore decided to change the opacity of the text and made it less opaque so that the name would still remain in front  but you could also see the artist face as well. Also another feature I changed to the master head is the size of the text making it larger and spread further across the top of the page. I did this because the text was less bold I had to still remould it into being the focal point of the cover. I then moved the title above and around the eyes of the artist so that they were not covered up as I wanted the artist to give eye contact to the reader to essentially 'draw them in' to my magazine and make the reader feel like the model has a secret almost, something to tell, something the reader wants to know. 

The next thing I decided to edit is the colour scheme. Even though the colours remained the same being just purple and white which I chose as I had previously seen in a Billboard magazine when researching and decided that I think that they would compliment my photo and the overall genre. I didn't want to use pink, (the typical and traditional colour used in a pop magazine) as I felt like that was a convention that I wanted to challenge almost and try to make my pop magazine have a more edgy feel and look to it. However when editing I felt like some of the titles where failed to be seen according to my questionnaires and therefore I had to rearrange them in order for them to be seen clearly. 
Also due to my editing in the final design to make the whole picture brighter and more vibrant I had to change which texts where purple or white. For example when writing "She's Back" due to the lightened pink jacket you failed to see that text in white and in my survey I recorded that the reader failed to read the cover line and actually didn't want to struggle to read it and someone commented on how they would move on to the next magazine. This resulted in me changing this particular cover line into purple so that now it can defiantly be read clearly. 

Furthermore in my first draft I failed to include some very important conventions being the bar code and the price so in my final design I made sure that I included these conventions.  

However what from my questionnaire I agreed that I didn't want to change the layout of the magazine, so I kept it very similar when editing. I felt that when researching magazines like "Top of the Pops" it seemed like their product suffocated in cover lines making it difficult to the reader to depict the message that issue wanted to portray. In my survey it revealed that the reader appreciated the fact that I had one main cover line being focusing on the artist "Lelia Ray" and how she was the model in the front cover. But they also appealed to how I did have other little cover lines so that they could see the other main features in the magazine which they could find interesting. Also they liked the fact that the features I have decided to include are very versatile so that I can hopefully involve the whole of my target audience and maybe even appeal to others outside.