In making my front cover, my main influence was the extremely popular gaming magazine “PC Gamer”, which uses a colour scheme of large white text upon red and black backgrounds for its title. I chose to somewhat invert this, using red text upon a white background and white upon a solid black one, leaving most of the rest of the cover’s unfilled space white to allow these bold colours to stand out. I chose these colours for their boldness – red, in particular, is a very common colour for magazine covers and suchlike, simply because it’s such a striking colour. Red upon white is especially striking, and so I chose to use very large and bold red-on-white text for the magazine’s title.
In the centre, I used only one image – the black-and-white logo of “Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkreig”, a popular mod for the PC grand strategy game “Hearts of Iron IV”, with the text “CHINA REWORK DELAYED AGAIN?” written underneath it. Both the use of a single black image on a fully-white background and the use of block capitals in the cover’s headline are, again, striking, as is the use of white-on-red text at the bottom of the cover for three supplementary stories. Kaiserreich is a very well-made and popular mod for a very well-made and popular game, and so I chose it for my front cover because it’s something any self-respecting magazine would certainly concern themselves with. At the bottom, I included other common types of stories found in gaming magazines – thinkpieces, hands-on reviews of new technology, and reviews of the latest games or game modifications, all with page numbers.