Construction of Front Cover Background for My Music Magazine

Before I completely finished my music magazine I needed to change a few things to make sure that the final product look just as good and as professional as I want it to be. To do this I decided to have a look at which colour would suit my background the best, without it impacting negatively on my image and various pieces of text.

My first idea was to have a blue shade as it would keep to my colour palette. However when I looked at all the different shades and I found that a blue shade wouldn't work for my front cover as some were too similar to my blue that I was using for text and masthead. Other shades of blue just didn't look right as it looked faded and didn't fit in with the professional image I wanted to give my magazine. My blue ideas can be seen below:

(To create the image on the left I used Effects; 'Inner Glow', 'Bevel and Emboss' and 'Satin')

I also wanted to see if two shades together would create a good background so I decided to keep the blue, however applied 'Gradient Overlay' with 90% 'Opacity'. You can see my image below:

  

However for these image I changed the 'Blend Mode' from 'Normal' to 'Hard Light'. Then for the red image I changed the colour from the blue to red by double clicking on the colour block and choosing the red colour from my masthead.


Another idea I had was to have a light shade of blue so that it would keep in with my colour palette, whilst still keeping in with magazine conventions as they usually have a light background, the effect can be seen below:

For the second image I decided to keep all the effects the same, but change the 'Opacity' to 60% so that it looked white as well as blue, keeping in with the magazine conventions and my colour scheme. I still need to complete a few more tasks before my front page is finished, however this is the final colour I have chosen for the front cover of my magazine; INSPIRE.