On today’s tutorial we are going to show how to create professional looking magazine covers, there are several professional plugins that can help you like Pagework produced by Boxwork Corp. The principles shown here can also be applied using the Boxwork plugin tools!

Starting off our tutorial we will need a close up picture like the one in our example. And by choosing the text tool we are typing something like “Treats”. Moving on we increase the fonts size and scale it proportionally to the main theme of the magazine cover.

When you will first type the Magazine title you will notice that it is hiding the main picture, however according to the industry best practises you want to the title to be floating behind the main picture. In order to do this we go to our layers menu and by dragging and dropping the Title Layer we move it under the picture layer so it is not hiding the picture at all.

Once you resolve the basic outline of your subject and title you will want to give your magazine cover some depth. In order to do this we click on Layer->Layer Style->Drop Shadow as shown on the Photoshop screenshot beneath.

We want to drop a shadow to our subject in order to create the depth illusion. The angle parameter on the Drop Shadow option sets the angle where we want the shadow to come from, by default that is 30 which means that the shadow will be dropping on the left side of our model.

Another useful parameter of the Photoshop Drop Shadow option is the Distance, which determines how wide the shadow will be. The higher this parameter the more wide the shadow and therefore the more depth we give to our subject.

Finally the size of the shadow decides how sharp the shadow in the end will be. Increase that in order for the shadow to be fading out instead of looking unnaturally cut out. Once done press ok and now you have given your subject a nice natural deep look.

On our next step we will look more into the optimal outline of our headers. If you look at any magazine cover you will notice that certain headlines stand out more than the rest by having biggest fonts. This is because they are meant to catch your eye and attract attention. It is directing you to the corresponding article inside the magazine.

Equally when you ll be designing your magazine cover you want to make some of your titles to stand out more than the rest.

Choose your text tool and try a striking colour like yellow to type in your main article. Use for this a bold fonts style like Arial Black and click on the Bold option to make them more prominent.

Make them smaller than your title and position them on the top left side of your magazine. You need to be careful when choosing your colour scheme so don’t choose similar looking colours for your background and fonts. For this reason we will change our background colour into something lighter.

Tip! When you use a font or a colour that blends in with the background its always good to use the drop shadow function to make it stand out more so even when they are matching exactly they will not blend too much.

Other quite important and basic features of a magazine cover are adding the barcode on the bottom right and the date at the top right of the front page. More over you don’t want to clutter your article titles too much.

Keeping these in mind within a good 30mins you should be able using these basic guidelines to create a magazine cover looking like this.

Try your own creations using this tutorial and create professional magazine covers!

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