Mock Up Front Covers, Focus Group and Process

To decide which photograph to use in my final production, I mocked up two covers using the same layout and fonts with the two photographs I liked the best and pitched these to my focus group, it was almost an even split with 17 preferring the cover on the left hand side and 13 preferring the right, many said their reasoning for preferring the left was the inclusion of more scenery so I decided to use this as a base to develop on.

An email from a member of my focus group:

The mock layout I created as a base was very minimalist and left a lot of empty space around the image which I felt would be best to fill with information about the contents of the magazine which would satisfy the uses&grats of the audience. I used the same font for the heading "inside" as I did for the locations listed underneath the masthead to keep a sense of continuity and used a complimentary font underneath. I also added a tag-line to the heading at the bottom to give it some more detail to interest audiences. I also increased the size of the image and bought the masthead up slightly to give the allusion of a more filled space. While these small changes did fill some of the blank space I didn't think that they looked very professional and decided ask my focus group what they felt would be best to change, the general opinion they gave was that they felt it was too plain and had a lot of space for potential text or other images, they also said that using only one font made the cover seem very flat and one dimensional. I took on board what they said and made several changes to alter this:

Using complimentary italics fonts mixed with the standard font I had been using gave a far more sophisticated feel to the cover, instead of including the magazine's contents as a list - which looked unprofessional and boring, I created small tag headlines for articles and included information about them below in a smaller font, as I had seen done in other magazines. I felt that this filled the space effectively and professionally and was happy with the cover like that, I made sure to include a date, price and bar code in the appropriate places (as per the conventions of other magazines) and put it back to my focus group who then said they felt that the font was too thin and too small to read and perhaps I could brighten up the photo.

I cut down the amount of text underneath the heading and put the font in bold and two sizes bigger to enable the audience to read the tag lines better and keep the page from looking too clustered. I also used the hue & saturation tool to brighten up the image to make it more appealing. My audience felt that after these changes there was nothing else to change and had no more opinions to offer.