Contents page process and construction

This is the process that I went through in order to create my finished product of my music magazine contents page. After deciding on my final images and the structure I began to edit my main picture.

On the left is the picture that I found in my research and decided to base my own on and on the right is the picture that I chose to use. To try and create this I first began by playing around with some of the tools in photo shop to see what I could do to try and achieve something similar. As you can see around the edges of the image on the left it is blurred, especially around the face, therefore I will do something similar to my own picture.

 

I first cropped the picture so that it would be the right shape for my magazine which is a long rectangle. I did this using the 'cropping tool'.

I then selected parts of the model eg. her leg and putting a coloured highlighter on it. I did this in various places until it looked multi coloured. The highlighter was one of the effects on photo shop that I found and had 3 bars of colour that you can adjust to make them brighter and different coloured. I chose to keep the colours very bright with mainly blue a the top, keeping the colours cooler around the models face so it did not look too red around her hair.

I managed to get the blurred effect on her face and arm by using the blur tool in photo shop.

After this I selected the whole of the outside using the 'lasoo tool' as seen in the picture above. I did this to make the background completely white and I did this by brightening it until it looked white in colour, shown in the picture to the left. I then selected the image as a whole and added a cooling effect to the picture to take out some of the Orange colours.







I then began on the rest of the aspects of the contents page, starting with the title. I drew up a text box and wrote 'contents' in the font of 'verdana' which is quite simple. I placed it in the top left corner which is where I planned to put it in my drawings.
 

This looked quite boring and plain so I made the 'C' of the word contents bigger than the rest of the word to add some effect and make it look more eye catching. I think this looked much better and made it look like more of a title rather than a subheading on the page.




The next stage that I focused on the was the main text. I began doing this by listing some numbers from 1-74, and put a pale pink highlighter around them to match the colours in the main picture. For the headings of the contents page I drew small boxes for each of them and filled them black with white writing inside.


Once I had put the text in that I
wanted, instead of putting a whole border around the section, I put two lines either side of the writing so it did not look randomly placed there.






I then placed the main image in the space that I planned to put it in which is the right top corner, I did this and made sure it was large enough to fill a large space on the page. After that was placed I placed the two smaller square pictures of concerts underneath, making sure they covered the bottom ending of the big picture.







Lastly I put a small version of the front cover below the title with the issue number next to it. In the same style I made small orange boxes with number of pages in to put in the corners of the images.









After completing what was essentially my finished product I began to pick out things that I did not like and things that looked quite messy. I also noticed that there was quite a large space in the middle of the picture and the text. However I did not want to do anything that was going to go completely away from my research, so I went back and looked again at one of the contents pages I featured in my specific research.

This is the one that I chose to look at again (above) for more ideas. The first thing I noticed is that there is not gap between thier image and text, however my image has a white background and just makes it look empty. One thing I noticed is the black line above the image and text box, and the black line inbetween the image and text box. This gave me the idea to create something like this. (right)

To do this I had to make my title slightly smaller so that it would fit and moved the body of text down slightly. Then I simply drew up 2 lines and gave them a weight of '4pt' and put them down the side of the text and image and underneath the title.

The next problem that I had was the squares that have 'issue no 22', '31,16 and 53' in them. I think these looked quite flat and boring so I looked again at my research and found that this one had not boxes around them. So I though of created just the numbers and words alone but thought they may still look flat and boring so I had the idea of making them 'jump out thepage' a bit more. To do this I discovered the 'drop shadow' tool in effects. I decided to stay with the colour orange just to keep it vibrant.

This image on the left shows the drop shadow I gave the number 31 and 'issue', with an opacity of 100%, distance of 3mm and size of 2mm. I then continued on to the smaller images and did the same but on the left small image you could not see the number very well so I moved it to the corner directly above.

I then felt that the 'issue no 22' could not be seen as well as the numbers with the drop shadow in orange so I decided to put it into black instead which looked much clearer and precise.