My magazine front cover

The task was to design an alternate magazine cover for an existing, well know magazine. We were given a choice of four images of four very different looking women and given a variety of different magazines, each covering different subjects and from very alternative ends of the audience spectrum. These magazines included: Dazed & Confused, Cosmopolitan, FHM, Sight & Sound, Woman & Home and Star. I decided that I wanted to create an alternate cover for Dazed & Confused magazine, a magazine that I was aware of and purchased myself occasionally. I had to choose one of the four women as the central feature for my cover, and looking through the models there were one or two that fit the Dazed & Confused style and met its codes and conventions, and some that steered so far away from what is related to the magazine. The image of the woman I used on my magazine cover was the one out of the four that I found most appropriate to use and fitted the style Dazed & Confused is associated with. The model has a natural, effortless beauty, she looks like the kind of person that is bored by their own appearance and doesn’t care for it. She doesn’t look like she is wearing much, if any make-up and her hair is tossed and messy and the clothes she is wearing are casual and simple. Her general appearance is unkempt and care-free; she draws the viewer in as they wonder why she is so seemingly uninterested in her appearance as the modern world obsessively is. This way of thinking, of expressing yourself to oneself and to others, reminds me hugely of Anne Cronin’s theory of ‘Compulsory Individuality’. The desire to be truly individual, to be like no one else, is constructed and strived to be, to the point where you are actually taken further away from truly being an individual, from truly, really being yourself.
The Dazed & Confused magazine covers consistently follow the same simplistic layout. Apart from the focal image of a particular celebrity, icon or model, there is usually just the title of the publication and some other text listing important features in the issue, as well as the date and barcode, where as other magazine covers are packed with images, articles, stories and information. Therefore I did not have a huge amount of work to do for the cover. Dazed & Confused use a very specific typeface on their covers that suits their style well; it is simple and understated, leaving the words instead of the font to do the talking. I wanted to recreate the magazine cover as closely as I could and make it as realistic as possible, I therefore needed a typeface that resembled the trademark Dazed & Confused one. The font that I found was called Impact (Roman) and had a very close resemblance to the original. It was a very big and bold san-serif typeface, simple and straight to the point. I added the ‘Dazed’ as one piece of text reading horizontally and then ‘& Confused’ as a separate, much smaller piece that read vertically. The length of the ‘& Confused’ also had to fit the length of the last letter of ‘Dazed’ in true Dazed & Confused style. The image of the young woman I had chosen was in black and white, and this had given me the idea of giving the issue a black and white theme. Because of this I coloured the font white, making the text stand out against the background much better than colouring it black would have done. I also decided to add a sub-title underneath the main title Dazed & Confused that referred to the theme of that issue of the magazine; ‘The Monochrome Issue’. As they were both titles I used the same typeface for the sub-title as I had for the title.
When this was done I needed to work on the other text that featured on the cover; the articles and stories that had predominate importance in the issue and that were most likely to attract Dazed consumers. To do this I researched other Dazed & Confused magazine covers in Google search engine and compared what occurred on these covers most frequently. On a lot of the covers featured a 'Face to Face' feature, which were interviews with certain celebrities, icons, public figures, people of importance, etc. I therefore did my own version of this 'Face to Face' feature, including a wide variety of different talents that I thought would be included in Dazed & Confused magazines and attract their readership. These stars included: actor Sean Penn, model Daisy Lowe, artist Damien Hirst and indie-folk musician Aaron Weiss and rap musician Dizzie Rascal. Below this feature I did another that I found was featured reguarly on Dazed covers; the Plus feature, which noted everything else important in the magazine. For these features I changed the typeface of the text to MattAntique BT, a slightly more fancy and interesting font than the title and sub title had been in. I did this because I wanted the cover to look slightly more varied and interesting and also because I wanted to visually separate the title from the rest of the text on the cover. The font size was small, yet still readable from a distance and I made sure to make the titles of the features (‘Face to Face’ and ‘Plus’) slightly bigger.
More important than any of this text however, is the feature that links to the image of the celebrity or figure that is the focal point and main feature of the entire cover. I used a western themed typeface on the individuals name because in my opinion she is dresses quite western-esq (considering the denim looking waist coat/shirt). The rest of the text was in the same style as the other features. I made the subject of the text about something that I knew would interest the Dazed & Confused readership. Rather than making it about something to do with appearance or clothes or something generally materialist, I chose to write about something culturally/spiritually themed, because I knew the consumers would approve of that.