Magazine Cover: Evaluation

My aim for my magazine was to try and create a magazine cover that looked like a legitimate Scream Horror Magazine cover, and I think looking at the final product I think it was a success. Comparing my magazine on the left to a published edition of Scream on the right I think I got the basic design layout spot on. Although in general I think the magazine cover was a success there are a few things that I would change had the chance. The first one is to include more smaller details, for example in the Scream cover on the right there are blood splats around the 'HORROR MAGAZINE ISSUE 16', there is also a paper tear border around the image on the bottom right, as well as a blood splat around the bottom right cover line's text.

I think that the successful things that I designed from scratch was the 'The Gear Shift Killer' title text and logo, with the gear stick and the saw combined in the background. The original idea for this would be to have a gear stick just come from the bottom of the logo, just a stick attached to the gear knob, with the gears written on top. This would go in a similar place to where the image is now, but after looking through Google images for stock shots of both a gear knob and a saw for quite a long time the idea sprung into my head to split the image into 2, flatten the colours and join them together, and the only reason I originally thought it would work is because they are both very recognisable figures, the outline of both shapes tells you what it is.

Another thing that I am really happy with from the magazine is the image. Tom and myself were really stuck for this image, because after we changed the title of the film and fiddled around with the story line, we didn't know what to do, so after sitting in his car for 10 minutes or so we thought of the idea of parking the car so that the windscreen was facing the woods by the side of college and putting ketchup on a blue glove we found in his car. Photographically the image could use a little bit of work and I would have liked to use a DSLR camera, but for the ideas we had at the time and the equipment we also had I am quite pleased with how the final product looks.

If I was to do this task again I would have spent a lot more time in the editing process of this cover. I would have liked to design my own magazine, with my own name, colour scheme and other things, but due to time and other subjects I thought it would be easier and probably more effective to use a pre-existing magazine like Scream. Although it isn't anywhere near as effective and nowhere near as fiddly, complicated and annoying, it has however meant we have a fairly solid final piece, and means I can focus more on other tasks within our campaign for our Horror Film idea.