Charlee Faraday, featured above in her own issue of Charlee Magazine.

I decided a great post to add to the building of my character, Charlee Faraday, would be to do the assignment “We’ve Got You Covered.” I used Canva for this assignment, finding a template magazine cover and altering it to my liking. Figuring out all the article titles took longer than formatting the cover itself! I tried to bring her personality in on each of the article titles and taglines, including the phrase “Where there is smoke, there is fire.” This phrase was part of the template I used on Canva, but it describes Charlee’s rational thinking to a T. I wish I could have gone the extra mile and written actual articles to go along with the cover, but I sadly didn’t have the time.

I wanted to have a real face to associate with Charlee, so when I made her introductory post I inserted the best representation of her I could find. Wanting to have a different picture of the same woman, I dug into the photograph I had on my Pintrest to find the model. I found out her name is Aiyana A. Lewis (linked is her instagram account). The picture for my magazine cover matched my view of Charlee perfectly: dressed casually and comfortably and looking contently uninterested. She is okay just watching and not interacting with much of her environment. It’s not that she isn’t interested per say, rather she cares more for thinking on than acting with the world around her.

This is the magazine cover I came up with.  I’ve always liked the retro style and I have a passion for gaming. Thus, I created a gaming magazine that combines the 8-bit and retro themes.  They go great together because 8-bit can be considered retro and is an older style the gaming industries used to utilize.  However, 8-bit and 16-bit games are still being made today and at a good quality too.  The recent game and a good example is “UnderTale” this game has gotten much praise.  Eight is a good number because it only goes up from there and it only progresses in eights, 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, etc.

see the process behind it

What to try this Assignment?

This week I was given the choice to pick which ever category I prefer from the DS106 Assignment Bank. I chose to go with “Design” because that is something I am lacking in and would like more practice with. I found a challenge that asks the participant to create a magazine cover.

With my focal theme being the outdoors I decided to create an outdoor magazine specifically focused toward women. When I started making this magazine cover I realized that I haven’t really looked at a magazine cover in years. Now a days most people get their information from the internet or social media. I do not even remember the last time I bought a magazine. So I did some research a found a few patterns. The first one is that the titles and taglines are usually a combination of 3 – 4 different colors. I thought that was bizarre but now that I’ve made my own cover I see now that it helps the taglines to stick out. Another observation I made was there is always one tagline that has a number in it. This is why I added the “10 packing essentials” toward the top of the print.

To create this magazine cover I used Canva which is a free program (as long as you use the free materials) or you can choose to pay for some of the graphics and templates offered if none of the free ones suit your needs. I then used a photo from my own camping adventures for the background and started adding in the taglines using the free graphics database with Canva. I also kept an additional tab open on my browser while doing this where I researched different magazine covers to get some ideas.

If you were to create your own magazine cover, what would be your topic and/or target audience?

Tagged: #cudenver15, #DesignAssignments, #DesignAssignments1732, #ds106