Magazine front cover layout development

This is my front cover layout magazine development.

REFLECTION:

Even though this is the easiest out of all the three pages that I have to do for this magazine, it still took me a long time and a lot of experimenting before getting the right one for me. And due to all the other amounts of work I had to do, I could not really shift my focus mainly on the cover (which is the literal image of the magazine) and I do not like to say this over and over again but the fact that I have zero designing skills makes it worse, I am not looking forward to doing this kind of project anymore.

This is my first attempt on playing around with coverlines and masthead alongside with a picture on google draw.

These are my rough sketches for my magazine cover, I haven't really chose any of them as I am still thinking about new ideas to determine which rough design is the best one.

I tried using this photo, in my opinion it is not very good as there is another person in the photo, as I wanted this magazine to be focused on only one person as the head and the soul of the magazine. 

So I decided to use this photo, it has other people of course, but the ball is in my hands (the so called celebrity in this magazine), which emphasizes that all the attention is on me shooting the ball. Even though this is a very good picture, the only problem is that my teacher (who gave me feedback) told me it does not look like I am a celebrity athlete in my own club as I am wearing a Manchester City jersey.

So I decided to revert to this picture, its all just me and the ball, the background is also neutral making me able to experiment colours of words and fonts without worrying if it can't be seen by the people reading or not. I would keep the colours of the heading white and yellow 

After I did all that, I experimented with fonts and added my main articles as coverlines while keeping my masthead with the classic canva font, I added words on both sides  in order to make the magazine look eventful

After consulting with my teacher about the design, he talked me to reducing the amount of words and changing the fonts, so I decided to only put the shoe names (to support my main article that will be in the double page spread). And remove entirely whatever is in the right side of my magazine. After asking my friends for recommendations, they told me to add a hint of black gradient on the left side to make it visible, while making the celebrity name on the bottom go to the right side of my magazine (conforms to the genre)

So this screenshot on top is basically what happened after I lifted the words into 100, I also asked my friends and they asked me to change the font (which I did, I hope you can see the difference between the screenshot on top and the one on this). I added barcodes in order to see how it will look like.

Here, I also added the plus icon and the word more in order to conform with SLAM magazines designs as I also took it as an inspiration, my friends says it looks better as I really have totally conformed to basketball magazines in my own style of fonts and typefaces and my own articles.

After consulting with my teacher, we decided to remove the plus icon and add the editions and make the barcode smaller, this really looks neater, better and more minimalistic, which conforms to the designs of magazines directed at the younger generation.

Here, I have changed,"HoopHub Feb'24" into just Feb'24, this would conclude the last part and the final process of my cover page as a whole. I think it looks insane, it is minimallistic and the colour scheme conforms to the conventions of typical basketball magazines who allign their colours with the cover artists context/jersey.