Front cover for music magazine - evaluation

To summarise, I believe that the front cover for my music magazine was very sucessful and achieved all of the aims I wanted to meet. After recieving feedback and making some changes, the magazine looked far better as it suited the audience's needs. I particularly like the title for the magazine as it is very masculine and features a very retro design on the side; a skeleton. Additionally, it is big and bold which is important as the buyer will be instantly drawn to the magazine on the shelf as it will be eye catching. The next feature on the front cover is the puff. This is in fact a base drum which has been manipulated (by myself) to look like a shape which is supposed to hold text. I think that this is a very effective feature of the front cover as everything links with the genre rock and doesn't look out of place. The text inside the puff is also very important as it entices the reader to buy the magazine and find out secrets to the rock world. One other thing to mention is all of the conventional features which are to be expected in any magazine. These include: barcode, date, banners and the issue number. As well as the content on the page, I think that the background contrasts well against all of the imagery on the page. I purposly chose a black and white gradient as it looks clean but is also a standard colour found on most magazine types. If I had chosen a block colour like black or red, this would have looked far too bold and dominating and may have made my magazine look more like a poster. Finally, the grey, transparrent boxes which hold the text around the page work very well and look professional. This was a feature which I managed to emulate from my style model. I like these rectangular boxes as they do not dominate the page however the add clarity to the text so that the reader can easily identify what is a tag line and what is part of the image. Here is an image of the front cover: