Magazine Cover Second Draft

This is the second draft of the magazine cover. I have incorporated the audience feedback from the first draft to create a poster that will appeal more to my target audience.

The first thing that I changed about the magazine cover was that I added a different background image. The feedback said that the cover looked to plain, bland and boring without a background image. So I chose to use a dark background of black wooden planks. I chose this background as since it is dark it conforms to the generic conventions of the thriller genre and could also give an insight into the setting/tone of the film.

I also decided to change the splatter of blood on the magazine cover as the large, bright red splatter of blood could have potentially made the magazine cover hard to look at or hard to read due to the competition of colours on the magazine cover. I chose to use a smaller, more subtle splatter of blood. The blood splatter also implies that there will be violence and potentially gore in the film.

Another thing that was missing from the cover was the other features of the magazine, like cover lines including the different films being reviewed, etc. I decided to look at upcoming films that are soon to be released and included similar films to our film genre and blockbuster films, as the magazine I based my cover off usually covers large-name, large-budget, blockbuster films.

Another issue with the magazine cover was that the masthead looked to simple/lacklustre, I decided to completely overhaul the masthead area/top third of the magazine cover to create more space and make that area look better/more professional, so instead of just having the magazine company masthead, I decided to move the additional features in the magazine above the masthead to make them smaller, but still readable and in a better position.

Another suggestion that my audience feedback returned was that I should include more font styles. Before I just had one font style for all of the text on the magazine cover, however, after looking through more fonts, I chose a few more fonts that still look professional and I feel fit the genre of a thriller film and magazine cover.

Finally, another main issue with the first draft of the poster was that there was a severe lack of features that conformed to a standard magazine cover. Therefore, I decided to add more of these features/conventions, like a bar-code and a price, as well as a website to the magazine company and a release date. These features help my magazine cover conform to the standard conventions of a magazine cover.