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Autumn 2008

Magazine
* C O V E R    A R T *

 Professional Desktop Publishing

 
I am blessed with a daughter, Fran, who has just turned seventeen. Like many her age, she enjoys wearing fashionable clothes and make-up. Her hair style changes at least once a month as does its colour. Although I'm a mathematician, I've lost count of the number of handbags she owns. As a dad, in Fran's eyes, I have no taste. What should I give Fran for her 17^th birthday ?
 
Helen, my partner, suggested that it would be amusing to give a framed authentic looking 'fake' celebrity magazine cover. The idea was, Helen explained, to present Fran as a star. This sounded to me like something Fran would definitely enjoy.
 

 
A cursory search on the internet revealed that a small web-based industry produces 'fake' magazine covers of the sort we had in mind as well as, for example, covers in the style of popular football, yachting and golfing magazines. A typical charge is around £25.
 
I sneaked into my daughter's bedroom and quietly took one of her 'OK' magazines away to study. Desktop Publishing is something that RISC OS is exceptionally good at. A more authentic replication of the 'OK' style should be more achievable on my Iyonix than on the Microsoft and Apple machines that the internet businesses were using.
 
The easiest way to initiate the project was to use Draw. I thought I'd switch to TextEase, Techwriter or ArtWorks once I'd got a feel for what I wanted to do. After two hours, I'd sussed out which fonts to use, what point size they needed to be, and how to add shadows to the text and box it as required.
 
Meanwhile, Helen raided Fran's FaceBook page for photographs. Then, as I working on the JPEG photos - cropping them using Paint on my Risc PC - Helen concocted a list of text snippets that related to 'in-jokes' that we, as a family, had shared with Fran over the last few months.
 
The adjusted photos were dragged into the evolving magazine cover which was still being regularly saved as a standard Draw file. I asked myself "Could I really produce a professional quality magazine cover using just Draw ?"
 
The answer was, "almost but not quite". For one poor quality photo I played around with the 'colour swapping' facility of  David Pilling Scanning Software, trying to hide a lack of colour depth. Some of the colour swap experiments are shown to the right.
 
It was when I noticed that the text boxes on the real magazine had a transparent shadow that allowed the underlying image to partially show through that I knew I needed software more sophisticated than Draw. I dragged the drawfile into ArtWorks to add the partial transparency required. ArtWorks also made it easy to save the finished file as a PDF which was the format my local printer had requested I supply the image for professional printing onto proper glossy magazine paper.
 
Helen and I ended up spending a lot of time getting the cover right but it was a most enjoyable project. If you are struggling for gift ideas, this is a great way to have some fun and end up with a unique personal gift. 

D · O · W · N · L · O · A · D

Autumn 2008

Click on the Mag/zip file (above) to download the zip file containing this article's magazine cover in Draw, ArtWorks and PDF format.
Use as a template by replacing the photographs and text.