Planning Cover
Up to now I have been heavily inspired by flowers. I think they are beautiful in the colors they produce and to me represent femininity not just in the traditional sense but also, at least for me, represent empowerment and strength. Specifically I thought of the picture of a woman during the Vietnam war who held up a flower to soldiers.
Therefore, I thought to name my magazine "Flowers that Empower," "Flowers" referring to the women that would be featured in the magazine. I decided against it because I just wasn't convinced and I didn't really want to call the women featured flowers because of the connotation (for many people) of flowers being fragile and delicate. I then thought to name the magazine "Women in Bloom" which I liked more. However, I thought it sounded like I was aiming at an adolescent audience by saying that they were "in bloom." Additionally, the title was too wordy so I decided to shorten it to "Bloom." I'm really happy with this title because it has significance to me and I feel like it does target a female audience. I sketched out how wanted the masthead to look like and as of now I am still indecisive as to whether I want a single flower in each o or a collage of flowers. I am mostly leaning towards one flower in each o that changes every issue.
As you can see to left, here is my rough sketch of what I want my cover to look like with comments in red. I am pretty confident in the masthead and I want to figure out how to transfer my drawing of it to my computer and insert the images into the o to see how that will look. Other than that, I am not quite sure what color I want my background will be but I want to first have my pictures done for the cover to then figure out what color would look nice in the back. I want to match the colors to the outfits that the model is wearing, hopefully I will be able to do that. What I am thinking for the cover photo is to have my sister be the model since, to me, she embodies what a confident, independent woman looks like. She is feminine and bold, strong and daring which is exactly the type of person I want to represent my magazine. She is 24 which is not young but also not too old for my target audience. The way I want to set it up is to have two sides of her shown back to back to show women that "you could be both." I will be discussing this and the pink notes, which refer to specifics of the photo, in my future post about planning the cover photo shoot.
Lastly, the articles. I have been going back and forth about how many cover lines to include because as I have mentioned various times before, I would like to keep the magazine simple and free of clutter. I was thinking maybe 3 cover lines aside from the main one, which will refer to the feature spread about my model. I think that will be something I will decide once I have the cover photo done. Meanwhile, I have some working article titles and descriptions that could used either in the article or the table of contents.
