Magazine front cover

I have completed my task of creating a front cover and my end product look like this. Personally i am very pleased with the front cover as it fits the brief perfectly.
When creating my front cover i firstly selected my image and added an effect onto to it by filtering and selecting blur. I then choose two very distinctive cover the first being blue as it is the schools colour, i then selected pink to represent my target audience which is girls and the connotations of this is being very girly and fun. As a result of selecting these colours i made the basketball pink and her jersey number, but left the rest blue. This made the sport which the magazine is about stand out and be instantly identified.
Also as you can see in my background the outline of bricks are shown this shows the rough side of basketball and the "streets" in which they originated from.
Once my cover image was created i then selected a specific typography to be used throughout the cover which was Franklin Gothic medium. This was because it looked both formal and informal enough to stand out as a cover of a school magazine but still relate able and personal to the female target audience. The colour of my text is black this was to prevent their being too many colours and drawing away from the actual image itself. However i did leave the the masterhead in the pink as it is the magazine title therefore it most stand out and be recognisable also it links to the image of the basketball which is also in this colour. The skyline is in the same pink also as i decided to put the skyline in front of a black rectangular background.
After this i selected my staplines, masterhead and skyline and positioned them in the appropriate areas and added effects to make certain word stand out by making them bold and enlarging the text size. For example the word "free" this acts as an extra incentive for my target audience to purchase my magazine as they know they will be benefiting themselves in more than one way as they will be expanding their knowledge on basketball as well as getting free perks. Also the name "Tamika Catching" is in bold to highlight this famous basketball player and an idol in many peoples lives.
Finally i added the finishing touches to the magazine by adding a bar code and issue dates on the cover and positioning them in specific place to fit the conventions of a typical magazine front cover.
Once all these elements where put together with the use of many layers, this enabled me to position certain layers in specific areas of the front cover. Too many layers were not used as i did not want the cover to be about the quantity of stories on the cover but the quality of the fewer stories. This as a result creates a sophistication to my cover which i feel makes it look more classy.