After analysing the two other products I decided to create a mock-up on paper of the layout of my own spread. I decided that I would stick to the conventions that I observed in the two spreads that I looked at. Firstly I chose a colour scheme, initially it was going to be a beige, white and blue; I thought that the brown would reflect the colour of books and the shop. However I later decided that this would not prove interesting enough to the eye, and may look boring. Instead I used the themes; blue, white, red and black. These colours compliment each other well, and the blue background proved interesting accompanied by striking colours such as red. I decided that I would follow the idea of placing the title and text on the left and the pictures on the right. This idea is because the human eye looks from left to right, so first we would see the title of the article, then the pictures on the right page. After looking at the photo’s that I took on shoot, I decided that rather than having one large picture spread across the page and interlinking with the text I would use two smaller pictures with borders. This was mainly due to the lower quality of the image as it was not taken on a professional camera. When I tried to stretch the image, the pixels looked too stretched and grainy, so I left them their original size. This would be something to take into consideration if I were to perform the task again. In relation to the photo’s I also changed the brightness levels on the top-right hand photo, as it appeared too dark. This was a relatively easy process. Initially I was going to use the programme quark for my double-page spread as it is what professional magazine editors use; however I decided to use the programme Photoshop cs4 in the end, because of its ability to change picture quality, and I also didn’t feel I’d be able to familiarise myself with a programme such as quark in my time-limit. I had never used this software before, so it was a large learning curve. After familiarising myself with the product I opened a new document and set it to the size that a double-page spread would be. I then applied my background colour, navy blue. I dragged some guidelines on to the product, so that I had a visual aid to show me where things like text boxes should be placed. Next I toyed with some fonts to use for my main header, and the sub-text beneath, I decided on Lucinda Calligraphy as it gives the impression of old handwriting and therefore the old bookshop that I am advertising. I chose white as the colour for this text, and also for the article itself. I then imported four photos that I had chosen from the shoot. One was of the outside of the bookshop, another, my subject conversing with a customer, one of her smiling and the last of a row of books. The row of books was essential to my spread, I placed the image at the top, and moved the text over the top, I then pasted the image all the way across the top of the spread. Both of my subject seemed very intimate, this was what I hoped for as I wanted it to catch the readers eye and make them feel a connection with this woman from the page. The idea of layering causes some difficulties when creating a spread such as this, because after placing my photos in their desired places, I decided that I wanted a white border around each. This meant creating white boxes of the right size as a new layer, then moving each photo up the list of layers, so that it would be on top of the shapes. I then created three boxes of the colours white red and black, merged them together and placed text inside them, giving programme information. This was extremely necessary for my double-page spread to work, as otherwise the reader would have difficulty finding show time and would probably not bother watching the programme. I decided on the placement of the circular photo of the front of the bookshop to be in the centre of the text, a commonly used technique, because it brakes up the text itself, and makes it appear more interesting. The last task was to create three text boxes as the final layer, and fill them with text about the programme. I wrote the text in a word document, so as to avoid spelling errors, and copied it into the boxes. I then created a forth in the top right hand corner over the images of books and entered the name of my magazine ‘TV LIFE’ to appear as a logo. This was in red.
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