Magazine covers are thought about and designed carefully; it’s the cover image which on a whole makes a sale. Here is a step by step guide to designing a magazine cover in Photoshop.

1) First you need to open you Photoshop and create a new document under ‘New’. If you haven’t got Photoshop you can download it from the Adobe website. We will be using CS5.5 but CC is ok for this guide. http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html?promoid=KAUCA

2) When you click ‘New’ choose ‘International A4’ as your canvas size. Click ‘ok’ and your new canvas should open. If you want a different size you can set it by using the custom dimensions option, Be sure to have the measurement in ‘Pixels’

Magazine

Design in

Photoshop

STEP BY STEP GUIDE

3) Once you have your document open we can now start to make a rough copy of what your cover may look like. If you have a plan use that but if you don’t we are going to lay out what will go where. We will be using the shale tool for this.

4) Now we want to choose out main story and find a cover image. We are going to use Godzilla 2014 for an example. Find a good image which has the main focus on the right side as the left-third side will cover the left side up. NOTE: You don’t have to have the Third side on the left. You don’t need it at all if you choose to!

The header is where the title and slogan will go. Many magazines like to put a puff in the header but we won’t.

A puff piece is an area on the cover which would make the audience buy it or be more interested in the magazine; Sometimes a prize or gift.

The anchor text is about the cover image.

Left-third side will show the best stories in one block. Short punchlines with outstanding detail on that topic.

5) Now we have our cover image chosen we can work on our header and anchor text areas. REMEMBER: The puff pieces are best done last! We are going to use a bold font for our title so it stands out and the audience can see our magazine from far away.

We have chosen our title and slogan now which stands out and is bold. Next we can add the barcode and pricing.For the anchoring text we have chosen a simple white and yellow style as it links to the magazines key colours and shows you it is a main part.

6) Next but not last the left third side. Here are our stories: The last of us FILM Godzilla (Anchoring and cover) Fifty shade of grey FILM Future of film

7) Now we have added almost everything we can now add some puff pieces!We have chosen to do a GTA V giveaway. Now we have finished our magazine! You can add other puffs and stories but we’ll keep it simple.