Final product progression

My final product went through quite a few drastically different styles and layouts this is what the progression of it looked like 

 To begin with i picked the photo that i thought would make the best front cover, and would set the tone of the the magazine so i went with the one shown above and stuck with it, i made some changes to it in photoshop to make it sharper and to take out any of the imperfections in my models to make them more camera friendly and i positioned it as such. The thought carefully about the composition of my piece as i wanted it to fill up a small space and use perspective well with models of varying distances. The prop that i used was originally there to be the reason for the buttons on the photo and to make it like a  clever little way of advertising a free poster by pretending it was a message, however as you can see later on i scrapped this idea and kept the phone for a narrative purpose. The text was very basic and i tried to keep to a formal text style however i quickly realised it didn't go with the theme of my magazine and it didn't have much impact on the reader. I also figured that i had used too many colours already and hadn't stuck to the three colour rule which effected my piece as i had already used three colours and hadn't even done finished half of the design.
I didn't use many different tools for this part of my unit 3 work as i re-did it quite early on so the most i had done was use the healing tool for the photo, altered the contrast and colour curves of it and used the sharpen tool to make my models more camera friendly.
For the graphics of the magazine i hadn't downloaded any new fonts so i had only created some new layers and inserted some text and changed the sizes and colours. I also inserted some circles of varying sizes for the 'Free Poster Inside' graphic.

 After investing quite a bit of time into my original draft of my front cover i took a  risk and compleltey redid my style and layout because i wasn't happy with my product so i went back onto dafont.com and spent about an hour trying to find the correct style of font that i wanted, ones that would be big enough to fill up space but also were easy enough to read at a distance so they would catch the readers attention. For my fonts i picked 'Bebas Neue' for the headers and sell lines and 'Vintage' for the title both of these were sans serif.
After deciding on my fonts i had to choose what i wanted my colours to be throughout the magazine as i didn't want to make the same mistake as i did last time by not sticking to the three colour room and making it look too complicated and tacky, so i ended up going with black white and yellow/gold the reason for this choice was because i felt like i wanted to have quite a modern feel to my magazine and i took inspiration from an Esquire magazine and saw that the colour scheme went really well with the headers that i was using.
After about a week of feeling as though i had finished my front cover i kept checking back on it and couldn't pick out why but i just wasn't happy with it.
The tools i had used for this were quite simple really i had went to the website dafont.com and downloaded the fonts that i wanted to use, they then instantly became available for me to use on Photoshop, after this i inserted the headlines and sell lines i wanted to use and simply changed the text colours and font sizes and styles. I put a stroke effect on the title of my magazine to make it stand out and look more stylised, i did this by clicking the 'FX' icon in the bottom left of Photoshop ad selected 'stroke' it then came up with an extra window that allowed me to change the thickness and colour of the stroke effect on the fonts.
I went online and searched up barcodes in Google images and picked the most applicable size and then saved it into my pictures, i then went back to my product and opened up the picture that i had saved and dragged it onto my product and re-shaped it to be the appropriate size on my front cover.
For the baseline and skylines i simply created a new layer and created two different coloured rectangles and stretched them to fit the area.

 I realised after about 2 hours of staring at my work that it was the layout of the text and the button that i used wasn't aestectily pleasing also i forgot to put in anything on the baseline and my sell lines were too far apart. So i rectified the situation by moving the headers around so that you could still see my models and the main focal points of the photo with ought being too close together, i then added in an extra circle to the button and created a small line circle to go around it to make it stand out a bit more. The rest of the changes were just small ones such as rotate the text in the button and make the 'WIN' stand out more to attract viewers to it, i also took off the stroke on the text at the skyline and instead of putting a stroke effect on the word 'Exclusive' that was on the base line i simply changed it too white so it emphasised it more subtly.
Now i had finished with creating my front cover.

This was my first idea for my DPS, for this i had taken inspiration from an NME magazine and was very happy with the design of how the text was layed out and i was happy with the title and more so with the kicker however i was unsure of its length.
Looking back on it now i am extremely happy that i later scrapped this idea and changed to a sleeker look because it made inserting images onto it a lot easier and the look improved a substantial amount.
In this draft i figured quite early that i had used too many colours however i was happy with it as i thought it gave it quite a vibrant feel and that it made it stand out more, i also thought it was easy to realise that i was using different colours to represent the most popular social media websites brand colours, however i realised that maybe it wasn't clear enough and just looked as though i wanted to use as many colours as i could making it look tacky.
The tools i used for all this is i had created 6 clear boxes in which i copy and pasted the article that i had written into and used the text flow tool to transfer the text into each box.
For the quote box and title with kicker all i did was create clear boxes typed in what i wanted and used the box fill tool to have add a colour in it.

After deciding to completely re-do my DPS i had to figure out a design i wanted and stick with it, i then had the idea of picking one of my photos and basing my design around so after choosing the one i wanted it quickly came to me to create a big standout headline and strong colours with strong text but quite a simple paragraph design. The picture i chose has a powerful eye line it is centred directly in the centre and i have configured the depth of field so that the gun is out of focus and is centred on my model.

The tools that i used for this was the drop cap tool which just involved me highlighting the letter i wanted to use and increases its drop cap size in the text tab. The other tool i used was picture insert in which i clicked the 'File' tab at the top and then clicked onto the 'Place' option and selected what picture i wanted and then positioned and re-sized my photo accordingly.

After finishing it i went back and did some revisions such as creating a new kicker to something more appropriate and added a quote box on the picture to fill up some space and compliment it. 

After realising that my DPS looked kind of unprofessional and got a few people to look at it from an objective point of view i went back to my previous designs and looked at some of the things that was weak with it, such as the title design and how it just didn't really stand out. So i created a rectangle filled it with my gold colour that i have been using throughout went onto the 'object' tab and clicked the 'conner options' i then proceeded to change the bottom left corner to a more rounded shape to give it some volume and a slick feel to it. After that i inserted another rectangle and did it black stretched it and inserted text on top of it. The text was easy enough i added a stroke effect on some of them and changed the mitre and spacing between the texts to give it a more compressed or stretched out look to it, this filled out more room on the page which gave the page a feeling that more was going on with it and made it look more appealing as it had more depth and less blank spaces in it.

I changed the font styling of my article from 'Minion Pro' to a more simplistic styling of 'Calibri' so it had an extra sense of maturity to it and professionalism. I added in a straight line in between my columns to show off the margins and to give the article a more elegant and slick look to it, i did this by clicking the line tool and placing one then right changing the strokes weight and doing this two more times for the other parts i wanted to do it to. I had enlarged my DPS picture and repositioned it so my models eye line was in the top line and the guns barrel was in the centre this creates an extra feeling of threat for the reader. I had done what i had done earlier for the button on the front page so this wasn't a new skill that i needed to learn. In my final product i had added in sub headers to my articles to divide them up and have little summaries of what the paragraph will be about.