Canva
The editing software I decided to use for the magazine cover is canva.com. Canva is a powerful tool with many helpful features, and best of all, it's completely online! This is a necessity since I only have access to a Chromebook at school. I also have access to the education edition with many additional features, making Canva the obvious choice for this project.
Elements
The elements that I've chosen to use out of the selection made previously, is this image, and these coverlines that fit with it:
Are headphones damaging our ears?
5G internet - the price you pay to stay connected
Convergent technologies - playing Fortnite on your fridge?!
As for the masthead, the only mastheads from my selection list in the last post that would fit were Tech World and Tech Test. Out of the two, I disliked Tech Test since it makes the magazine sound like it's "testing" technology (like Mythbusters maybe), which it is not really. I therefore went with Tech World as the masthead.
First draft of the cover
The first draft of the cover underwent some changes (described under the color section) but remained mostly the same.
The masthead: "Tech World" uses the font SK Cuber, which I thought looked very techno with its bitmap style. It also has an effect applied called echo, which adds multiple faint copies of the text behind the original text. This makes the text look even more techno and makes it pop out more.
For the coverlines, I used a modern-looking sans-serif font called tomorrow. This font's sleekness and modernness fit the look of a tech magazine really well.
Other elements were added too. The background of the image was removed and replaced with a solid color and auto-enhance was applied (cause I can't be bothered to mess with sliders if Canva can do it for me). To imply that the headphones were hurting the actor's ears, red sound-wave-looking shapes were added next to the headphones to imply that loud sound is coming out of them. The volume bars at the bottom also are there to imply that the sound is loud (there are actually 2 images next to each other to make the UV bars since the single image could not be scaled).
Original Colors New colors
Color
Of all the elements on the cover, the colors underwent the most change. Above can be seen the cover with original colors and the cover with edited colors. The red color (#EC412D) is actually taken from the original image (the red flowers on the actor's shirt) and was the only color to stay consistent across the two drafts. In the first draw, the other colors were chosen custom and just eyeballed.
The yellow background was picked to express energy, excitement, and maybe even the painfulness of the loud music. The masthead was made purple so it would stand out from the yellow background (purple is complementary to yellow) the brightness of the purple color was played around with too to make sure the text stood out from the hair of the actor. The UV bar at the bottom of the cover was colored green since UV bars are usually green, and the secondary color was just a lighter tint of the same green.
However, something didn't seem right about those colors, and my peers also thought something was off, especially with the yellow background. So, I put my colors into Canva's color wheel (canva.com/colors/color-wheel). I started with the red color, since I thought that was the most solid of the colors I had so far and it was the only non-eyeballed color. And, since the cover had 4 main colors, I went with a tetradic relationship. Then the color wheel showed me the 4 colors that I should use:
- #EC412D - my original red color
- #79EC2D - a cool techno green
- #2DD8EC - a sky blue
- #A12DEC - a rich purple
The green and purple subsequently got replaced, and the weird yellow background was replaced with the sky blue color. This makes sense as most pictures have the sky as a background, so a light blue background looks much more natural. I also used a darker shade of green for the base of the UV bars and a darker shade of purple for the masthead echo.
Overall, I think the new colors look a lot brighter and better than the old ones, as well as selling the whole technological look and standing out more.
Sources
Canva. (n.d.). Color wheel - color theory and calculator | Canva colors. Color Wheel. Retrieved April 4, 2022, from https://www.canva.com/colors/color-wheel/
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