Daniel Seager's A2 Media : Magazine cover construction

The magazine was easy to make and was a quick process to do as we made a lot of them in AS and therefore understood all of the conventions and how to go about making them. I made the inital draft of the magazine, which was then altered by Archie whom had far greater Photoshop skills than I, which allowed him to tighten up any slight mistakes I may have made. I then used the combination of the quick selection and magic wand tool to get rid of the background and then pressed the control key and T too transform it to make it slightly bigger, whilst holding shift to keep it to scale. I then pressed enter to confirm the selection. Next I added the black background and added a smokey gradient it and placed the layer behind Joe to make it look like it was behind him. He then imported the Empire title and centered that as best as possible. Lastly I inserted the additional text using the text tool and and put the barcode in.

Archie was responsible for the next stage of making the magazine more professional and changing it from the draft to final look. To do so Archie changed the sizing of certain elements using the Transform of Ctrl + T and pressing enter to confirm the selection, this involved rotating the barcode so that it was horizontal instead and then moving it to the bottom right in a better location. Archie used the text tool a lot to create new text such as the text above the title and would change various text features overall.

This included the horizontal spacing between the characters, making them closer together and then also increasing the height of the text almost stretching it. Archie would then highlight certain parts of the text, access the colour pallet and change it to colours such as yellow and white which came of the page slightly more so it could easily be read.

Furthermore Archie added more images such as the posters and made them much smaller and changed their properties. This involved adding some layer styles such as a white stroke (to give it a border and polarized effect) and then a drop shadow to make it more 3 dimensional and more obvious as it was only small.

To create the banner graphic which features sub - headings and tag lines Archie inserted a 'tick' shape, rubbed out part of it, stretched it and flipped it to get the graphic. To make it the right colour of red he used the eye dropped tool on the Empire tool to get the same shade of red and then apply it to the banner and any other features such as the text or even alternated colour of stroke. He drew a rectangle and ensured that the background colour was red (the same shade as the Empire logo) so that it automatically filled it when he drew it.