Below are some things I looked at when planning my design for the Learner Survival Guide. I looked at 60's Flower Power Art, Surrealism in Advertising and Magazine front Covers for inspiration.
60's Flower Power-
In 60's Flower Power art there is a use of very bold colours with a wide spectrum and the designs are very 'busy' and have a contrasting palette. The shapes are quite simplistic with curved edges being predominant and they are two dimensional with very little or no shading and texture. Sometimes the use of colours almost clashes to make them eye-catching, so that the image and design stand out and are noticed. In most 60's Flower Power art the colours used are not normally those aligned with their counterparts on the colour wheel.
Below are some good examples of 60's Flower Power art, which demonstrate the above points.
Some of these (such as the second and third designs below) are slightly more complex, with a design running through the background also, and then colours are more pastel in shade. However, throughout, all four designs the use of curved lines, simple detailing using circles and dots and a line border around each flower or design shape (for example the fan shaped leaves/petals in design two) help to give structure to each part of the picture.
All together, these make all four pictures very attractive, bright and interesting - things I want my cover for the Learner Survival Guide to be.
Surrealism in Advertisement:
Surrealism in advertising helps promote a brand by using unusual images of their product to capture people's attention and imagination through the use of photographic manipulation using Photoshop, CGI and use of props and costume. Through the clever use of images you can instantly tell people what your product does and what it can do for them in interesting way.
The colours used then to be natural so as to make them seem almost a possible real situation and can change depending on the product being advertised. For example, the first picture shown below is from an advertisement for Harvey Nichols, and is of two men depicted as having fly heads and a girl putting make-up on with a lit up light bulb for hers. This would suggest that men will be attracted to her because she wears make-up from Harvey Nicholls, but for the advertisement to be effective the background needs to be quite dark so that her 'head' shines brightly to highlight the main point of the advert.
In all of these advertisements, you will notice that there is a contrast of colours to show what the main feature being promoted is (in the Wella Koleston advertisement, the hair colour is dark, but the background is a pinky peach colour which enhances and shows off to high impact the hair colour and brush), whereas, the Absolut Vodka picture again has a dark background to accentuate the 'smoke' bottle. The colour palette used in the water advertisement promotes this product as being natural - the colours used are earth and sky and the image tells you that this water has burst up from the rocks below and is pure and although the contrast is softer in this advertisement it still contains warm colours for the earth and cold for they sky and water.
Magazine Covers:
To give ma an idea of how to get an effective design for the Student survival Guide, I looked a some different types of magazine covers and how the images were created, if any effects were used, the use of text size and style and colours used.
The main purposes of a Magazine Front cover is to attract people's attention, tell them the main features in that edition of the magazine and needs to get people to buy that magazine rather than another one covering similar subjects, by being attractive, eye catching and not boring.
In the first magazine cover (Empire Magazine), I like the way that the main design uses monochrome colours for both the text and image, which is the main character in the main story in this magazine - it is very effective. To highlight the main feature in this copy of Empire, the title of the film they are focussing on is in a large font style (sans serif) in bright red. By using red, this text jumps of out the page and grabs your attention right away, and tells you immediately what the main story is about. The other text in red is the magazine title - another important piece of text.
I really like the way that the other articles in this magazine are either side of the image of Leonardo Di Caprio and they appear to taper in size from large at each side of the front cover to small in the centre (close to the image). This gives the illusion of Leonardo Di Caprio walking down a corridor of words.
The image of Leonardo Di Caprio looks as if it has been edited using photoshop to make the image a little grainy and the lighting looks quite sharp too.
Because only a few colours have been used on this cover, it looks really eyecatching and the colour scheme works well with the subject matter (which relates mainly to science fiction and fantasy films - the only film in this issue that is not of this type is highlighted in red - that is about thrillers).
In this second magazine cover, the PlayStation magazine, the font style is exactly the same as for the popular games console of which the magazine is about. In this edition they have used a gold coloured text which goes with the God status of the min feature about a war game. However, I don't think this colour works very well with the white background - it doesn't stand out as much as it could, and think that another metallic looking colour, such as bronze or dark silver would have looked much better and highlighted both the title and the main features of this magazine 9as they are all in this gold colour).
The image much be CGI as it looks like a still of a character taken from the main featured game. This image does stand out well from the white background and looks almost three dimensional, as if it is about to jump out of the page. This would get my attention, but I think that the text looks almost all the same on this magazine - there needs to be a bit more of variety in colour and style so that features stand out.
In this third magazine cover (Entertainment Weekly), I really like the way in which the colours blend together, but the image of Jonny Depp still manages to stand out - he seems to be looking directly at you, and this grabs your attention.
Again, the main feature of the magazine is the film, Sweeney Todd, which is about a demon barber so the colour scheme used, of different blues, monochrome image with some red lettering suits the main subject of the magazine.
The image of Johnny Depp has definitely been edited using photoshop as it is mainly black and white, but the area around his eyes have been coloured a reddish pink, to make him look quite evil. I think this is very effective!!!
The size and style of the text varies for each article, and the articles are show in red italic serif font, with the other text being sans serif bold text in either the pale blue colour of white, which sticks to the limited colour scheme of this cover.
Overall, the clever use of photoshop and the striking image put together with the three colours of text work well on this cover and I particularly like it.
The final magazine front cover I have chosen, is an edition of Martial Arts Illustrated. This is a very different cover to the previous one, as it has a wide variety of colours, and some of the text is outlined in a bright mustard yellow colour to make it stand out.
The main image on this cover is of Bruce Lee, and looks as it is a still from one of his films. In my opinion, it has been touched up slightly using photoshop, just to edit the shading a bit, but the photo otherwise looks as if it has been unchanged.
The text is mainly in sans serif style with a just the word 'special' in a yellow italic script style to highlight that this magazine is a special edition on Bruce Lee. The other articles are in different sizes and styles of font to easily see that they are about different subjects. Colour also helps identify the different articles (some are in yellow text, some white and some are white in a block of red).
Overall, although there are a lot of different colours used here, it looks quite exciting and this fits with the type of magazine (martial arts) and would be attractive to people.
