As I have previously stated, I intend to produce a magazine for my final piece for this project I am currently undertaking for my exam work.
I didn’t really have any ideas of what I wanted to achieve from my magazine cover and what I wanted to go for when producing the first few drafts if my cover because i knew that they would be drafts and that it would be likely I will change the cover’s layout or overall design for the final product. I began experimenting with different typography designs in Adobe Photoshop and I created one text design before the ones you see below but automatically decided it wasn’t what I wanted because it looked too polished and too f’forced’ as I was using default Adobe font types. I immediately took out my notebook and began handwriting the magazine title – which I already had an idea for in my head when I began – I wanted to call the magazine ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ a soon as I began the focus on teenage boys for the project because I felt it works really well.
The below images show the process of which I went through to create my current final draft of which I am very happy for and I intended to use this for my final product, however, with a few layout or design alterations if needed.
The images below show the process I went through to create the handwritten title and it was actually the first attempt which I used in my Photoshop mock up of the magazine because it had the look I was going for. However, it is likely I will re-produce this text again both on paper and then digitized into Photoshop because I know I can create a better version of this through more careful production of the specific lines to create stick men as well more polished looking letters. However, the look is supposed to be very rough and not clean and polished like a default font on software would because it is handwritten and I want to keep this authenticity.
After creating a couple of versions of the cover using fonts provided by Photoshop in their wide selection, I felt it may look more realistic and it would fit the theme better if I also handwrote the text ‘issue one’ and ‘£8’. I did this on the same piece of paper as well as drawing some arrows to add in also. I also drew a squiggly line to import into the software to use as an underline because I was not able to do this using the underline feature I usually would when working with provided fonts.
When I first inserted the handwritten text into Photoshop from an imported picture I took with iPhone of the notepad and the writing on it, I made it priority to remove all the negative space around the text – being the white paper. I did this through selecting the magic wand tool to manually select the white space around the text. This allowed me to erase the white paper which left me with the text – what I needed for the title to work. In order for me to remove this white space cleanly without the selected area bleeding into the writing, I had to apply some basic colour correction effects onto the imported image first to ensure the black writing was as dark and heavy as possible and the white surroundings was as light as possible to provide a clearly defined area to select so that I could erase the white surrounding.
After this, I noticed the writing was actually quite fine and didn’t stand out too much – as expected because I was not able to apply any bold effects to the type as it was not directly imported through Photoshop’s selection of fonts. To make the text I had imported stand out more so against the blank background I had chosen, I applied Layer Style effects such as a colour overlay to change the colour of the text as well as a ‘stroke’ to give a darker, more defined and bold outline to the text. I then, later on, applied a drop shadow effect.
This provided me the basis to move forward from to create tweaked and better versions of this primary design of my title.
The second draft shown above includes major alterations from the first version as I have imported a photograph from my shoot with Max. As well, I have changed the look of the title through changing the colour, positioning, size and removed the underlines. I have re-sized the size of the ‘issue one’ and ‘£8’ text aas OI feel this would look better once printed – I was taking into consideration the proportions and sizes of features once printed.
I have also produced a second version of the same draft but just with a different coloured background to give me a couple of options to choose from if this was what I was to go for in the final stages.
