STARTING MY MAGAZINE ADVERTISEMENT

Now that my CD cover is completely finished, I can start work on my magazine advertisement. I couldn't really produce this before my CD cover as I wanted to see how that turned out, and whether or not my wallpaper idea was successful (which I have decided I think it was). Furthermore, most magazine advertisements for music albums actually have an image of the album, which I couldn't add until the cover was finished.


I knew that I needed to make it look similar to the CD cover to keep them in consistency and create a solid image for the artist. So, as I have previously mentioned, I decided that I wanted to incorporate the same wallpaper image and the same ripping technique. To start with, I used the plain cream background with a relatively high noise level which was sized to fit a CD cover. I simply placed the image onto an A4 Photoshop document and duplicated the layer until it covered the canvas. This gave me the foundation on which to build my magazine advertisement, as using such a plain colour once again gave me free reign in regards to my colour scheme/use of patterns.

I then had to decide where I wanted to place the ripped wallpaper. At first I wanted to place it running down the side of the image, however I realised that this would massively restrict the layout, because in order to get the full effect of the pattern, it would have to occupy almost half of the page. I therefore decided to place the wallpaper along the top of the image, so I opened the original EDITED wallpaper image and used the same ripped brush tools to crop the image down to size.

The image above shows the section of pattern that I chose to use, as I feel that it shows the must interesting part of the pattern and also gives a bit more diversity as one side of is a lot less weighted than the other. After this, I copied and pasted the 'scratches' layer from my CD cover Photoshop document that I created using the noise tool. This simply added the same vintage look that I achieved with my CD cover. Having the pattern this bold would have definitely taken away from the focal point of the CD cover image, therefore I decided to make the pattern at the top considerably less noticeable by reducing the opacity of that layer. I reduced it to 42% which made it much less of a focal point, and ensured that when I added the CD cover image, that would be the most prominent aspect of the page.

Obviously this still takes up a considerable amount of the page, so to combat this lack of space I decided that I would place my main heading either in front or behind the transparent wallpaper. To keep in consistency with my CD cover, I had planned on using the same font, Nueva Std in the same purple/black colour. A typical convention of a magazine advertisement for an album is to have the main sell line saying something along the lines of "brand new album" or "the new album". 'Brand new' just didn't suit my theme or genre, as I feel it is a very shouty and 'out there' statement, which in my opinion would be way more suited to a Pop or RnB album. With this in mind, I decided to go with 'the new album', as it is a little more subtle than 'brand new', but still gets the point across successfully. I created the title using the text tool, however I found that the letters themselves were too wide, resulting in the text having to be restricted to a smaller point size. To overcome this, I used the transformation tools to elongate the text vertically, making the letters thinner and taller, allowing me to increase the point size and make it a lot bigger and therefore a lot easier to read. After all, this had to be one of the first things that the reader should look at so that they understand what the page is advertising. 

Because the wallpaper pattern is a dark blue/purple against a lighter contrasting background, on the bigger areas of pattern there are thinner light areas where the background comes through the pattern which I realised created quite a nice effect when the transparent image was placed on top of the text. It looked plain and a little boring when placed on top of the pattern, therefore I decided to keep it behind: