I've moved this thread from the Beach Life to the Smeargle's Canvas' Artistic Inquiries thread, since it's a fairly specific artistic question rather than a discussion thread. ~bbninjas
For the image, I think you've upscaled it somewhere along the line, at that is why it looks so pixally. A general rule of thumb is to NEVER upscale a .jpg or most .pngs, because it always always always looks terrible. You've also got a white background for your "How did this..." text box, which is cutting into the printer behind it.
Anyways, I suggest you took another look at some official Times magazine covers. Analyzing example texts that are relevant to your project is a very important skill in producing good assessment pieces, especially for English. This is even more vital if your teacher is one of those who doesn't actually teach you how do stuff, like my English teacher this year just gone.
Here's a few aesthetic choices that I immediately notice:
- There is always a single image that is large and covers most of the page. They are also always pictures of people.
- Notice the use of colours. There is white (or black) for most of the text. Some of the "less important" text is grey. Emphasis is added using the
bright red colour.
- Magazines use a wide variety of sizes and styles for the text. The text that the designer wants your eye to be drawn to is
large and in
bold letters. Notice how for the longer headlines, the most important part is larger ("The Next President").
- On that note, the fonts used are generally
bold or thick. Arial Black, Times New Roman Bold, Berlin Sans and the like are all good magazine fonts. Also notice how
italics was barely used and rather ALL CAPS was used for effect.
- Most of the text are at the top around the "TIME" part, or to one side. There isn't a lot of "negative space" - there isn't much text covering the cover.
- The date/timestamp that you've got on your cover is much to big.
And here's a few more technical elements:
- There is always an eye-grabbing headline that is normal short-and-sweet and relates to the picture on the cover.
- There is often a few other article headlines featured on the front. Those articles will have the author written immediately after the headline in a differentiating style.
- There is also another article featured above the "TIME" text. This would be your second most "important" article that should be trying to hook a potential reader.
You can do every single thing that I mentioned above in Microsoft Word, and probably easier than in a more complicated image-editing program.
