Evaluation of Front Cover / Contents page (Preliminary)

In my next blog, I will post the finished products of my front cover and of my contents page. I would do it now, but I forgot to attach them to an e-mail so I don't have them...
Fortunately, however, I managed to attach the smaller screen-shots of my project so I can prove that I did all these things.

Front Cover

To start off with, I loaned out a camera from the library. I then went around the school and took photos of various things, for example the boat outside the bistro, the statue of Sir Galahad, the main building etc.
After I had collected these photos, I uploaded them onto the computer and transferred them onto iPhoto for storage. I took three photos of Sir Galahad, each with the 'rule of thirds' in mind. One photo with the statue on the left, one with it on the right and one with it in the centre. I decided to use the photo with the statue on the far right so that I had room for some text of some sort in case I needed some. Also in my draft front cover I had the statue on the right hand side so I was aiming to stick to my draft.

I was very lucky with the background shot. The sun was in the perfect place for there to be rays of light shimmering through, and blots of colour making the shot look better than it would have done without them. This is the main reason why I chose this shot as a background. There was no need to edit this photo as I thought that it was fine as it was. My next step was to sort out the font, size, colour and style of my masthead. I had already decided that my magazine was to be called 'The Victorian'. From my draft it was clear that there would not be enough room on the bottom of the screen as that is where the feathered images were going to appear, and with my draft stating that the text was going to appear roughly around the top left of the screen, I decided that is where is will go.

My font had to be stylish to go with the theme of a school. After browsing through numerous font types, I came across the style that I felt best suited the magazine front cover. After I selected the font, I realised that it looked very bland and boring as it was:

As you can probably tell, something had to be done about this eyesore. The text was unreadable against the tiled roof. Luckily, Photoshop has a vast array of text edits, which i scrolled through looking for the best combination of edits. Eventually, I chose to use Drop Shadow, Inner Glow, Bevel, Emboss and Gradient (white/black). Here is how it ended up:

Hopefully you will agree that this looks much more respectable than the previous attempt.

Next on my front page agenda was to insert the three images along the bottom of the page. As I said on the draft, these will all be feathered around the edges so the corners don't appear sharp. This was a very easy function to use, all I had to do was select the area I wanted, move up to the feather bar and choose the number of pixels I wanted to be feathered.

When I chose the boat, the shape was too complex to just 'select'. To get round this I used the magnetic lassoo tool, which is a very clever tool that differentiates the colour difference to select an object. It took a while to go round the boat, but I managed to select it and feather it like the other three. Together, the images looked like this:

This is how my front cover came to be. As I said above, you will be able to see it on my next post in full.

Contents Page

The contents page was based on my draft. There was the heading at the top, the pages on one side and the page numbers on the other. I included two images onto the bottom of the page which made the page look less dull. I used the same font to write the whole of the contents page as I used for the front cover.

Again, after writing 'Contents', it looked boring, so I brightened it up a bit with some Inner Shadow, Bevel and Emboss. This is how the heading looked:

These are all the screen shots that I included and, again, you will be able to see the full Contents Page and Front Cover of my Print task in my next post.