Final Cover Choice and Edits

    After several iterations, the final cover is here. The last blog covered the creation of the 3rd cover option, and comparisons of all three. In that blog, I stated the second cover looked the best and was the most professional. I still stand by that, so it will be the final Cover.

Why?

    The photo is structured perfect (to my liking), has great use of coloring, has the most content, and and awesome main image. The way the main image overlaps the masthead is perfect, better than in the first main image. This is the only cover to have a footer, the barcode also wasn't in the first. This magazine cover is the only I could imagine being on a shelf. 

How Was This Cover Made?

    This cover began with the base of the first cover I made in Canva. Once the Masthead was resized (that wasn't on purpose, but I think looks better) I started to add in the details. The games logo, selling line, these were chosen because, the selling line was the description of that game in the first cover and the games logo was chose as it I wanted to focus on a different game than the first cover, same thing for the main image (last time it featured Metroid Dread, this one is Elden Ring). Game of the year was a cool thing to throw in, many publications have their own game of the year as well, so it might garner a few extra sales. The Review on Metroid Dread was changed a bit from the first cover. It was originally part of the selling line for the first cover. 

Everything Else

    The masthead was based on PC Gamer's version, not visual, but the name itself. I just changed the first part to reach a different audience. I chose the visual effects from scrolling through Canva's text formatting suggestions and found it. I change the colors to match the main image and deemed it good. The footer was an edition to just this cover, not the others, it works for this cover the most. It would not have looked right with the main images of the other two covers. I just messed around with shapes until I found something I liked, and added extra promotional material. The fonts were chosen to match the Masthead and the logos of the games presented. The mastheads font specifically was included in text suggestions as mentioned before. It's sans serif, which works well with a magazine about technology. The date and issue number were added because they weren't considered while making the cover, however I like to think this means the article can be read at any time, by anyone with out fear of being out dated (unless they know the release dates of these games).

Conclusion

    Creation a suitable cover is hard. It takes a lot of practice and familiarity with a program to get it right. I think I got lucky with what I made because it truly looks as if it could be on the shelf. I do have a bit of experience with canva, so I could design one fairly easily, and this one came out decent.