Magazine Cover Design with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign

1. Introduction: The cover of a magazine, he is the first and most important impression given to readers. So it is crucial to get it's designed right. I'm Martin. I have over 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, illustrator and Adobe certified instructor. I have worked with companies like BBC, these knee, Google, ikea, and I cannot wait to share my best practices with you. This is a streamline hands-on course focusing on a real life design project. I will be walking you through everything step-by-step and you will get all the exercise files so you can follow along in case you prefer not to copy me. You can also follow my workflow using alternative assets provided and create something completely unique that you can showcase in your creative portfolio. I am pretty sure this course will inspire you to create something amazing. We will start by analyzing great magazine covers and know about all the editorial design terms like mass had covered lines, path, skyline, and their role in the composition. We will then jump into Adobe Photoshop to edit and refine our main cover image and professionally separated from its original background, we will use Adobe Illustrator to put together a creative and engaging title design and some decorative shapes that will be used in our comp. And finally, we will put our magazine cover together in Adobe InDesign. Besides all the technical stuff, we will also cover some important graphic design theory that you will be able to apply in any of your future creative projects. You can join this course without any prior knowledge in graphic design, illustration or Adobe applications. But to complete the project, you will need access to Adobe Creative Cloud and a desktop or laptop computer, but now it's time to start creating. So I will see you in the next lesson. 2. Magazine Cover Workflow: In this project, we will work on a magazine cover. First, we will start in Photoshop and prepare our cover image, which will have to be modest in order to be able to place the title and some graphic elements behind the person, but still keep it in front of the photos. Original background. Just to make it easier to understand, this is the original photograph and these are the elements that will have to be in-between the original background and the person in the shot. Once we have done in Photoshop, we will switch to Illustrator to work on the title of the magazine, and to prepare the graphic elements as well in the background. And finally, to put together everything, we will end up here in InDesign, where we will add the dateline and the cover lines at the bottom, where we will utilize some very handy features of paragraph styles to make this project more fun to work on. You will be able to pick your own cover image to work with. And you will even be able to make up your own magazine title using this creative alphabet that you will have in the exercise files. If he's completely up to you, whether you want to follow step-by-step and recreate exactly the same version that I am going to work on or be a bit more creative and based on the techniques I'm going to cover, create a more unique and personal design. But before we get started on the project, in the next video, I am going to explain the most important terms and definitions used in editorial design for magazine covers. 3. Magazine Cover (Part 1): The most prominent and probably most important detail on a magazine cover has to be the masthead, which is short for master hat. And this is the title, design, or name of the publication, which you find here on the top third of the cover. And most of the time, this is created with a custom font and kept consistent throughout all the issues that come out. Sometimes maybe the color changes or the position slightly, but generally the font and the style is going to be consistent. The phrase mass had actually ended up being used in web design as well. That again, it stands for the logo or the main brand image that's usually on the top-left corner of the site. Most of the time, the masthead takes up the whole width of the magazine cover. But if it's shorter than that, like with Computer Arts or GQ, then it's usually on the top left corner. Now this is mainly because when you go to a news agent or a shop and the magazines are laid on top of each other, then this left third is the only visible part. So you should still be able to identify the name of the magazine just by seeing that section of the cover, the type of font, color and size, and even the kerning of the masthead. It really helps you to establish the target audience, our target market for your magazine. And you can clearly see that with the example here on Empire, which is a bit more masculine and bold compared to stylists, for example, which is much more feminine. The next element that we normally have next to the masthead is called tagline. Or it can also be referred to as cell line, strap line, or even Magazine back. And this is usually a smart than VT way of defining what the magazine is about. The GQ, its look sharp, lift, smart, or Esquire, it's men at his best or read, Computer Arts is inspiration, technique, great design. So as you can see, the tagline is usually a powerful, effective statement that can help to specify the subject matter or category of the magazine and other similar elements to tagline is called skyline or also referred to sometimes as banner or strip, which again is usually placed on the top or the bottom of the cover. And again, it's as wide as the magazine, so it takes up the whole width. And it, these two things can be very similar. But most of the time the skyline actually includes article titles or even names that are relevant to specific articles in the magazines. So it's almost like the extract of contents, like a mini table of contents in a sense. So just to be clear, which shortlist as an example, this I would consider as skyline because of its position and because of the way it promotes the different categories or genres that is covering. But it also works as a tagline at the same time. Since we have this example, we can also see that there's usually a dateline, again, very close to the masthead. In this case, it's very tiny every Thursday because it's a weekly magazine. But if it was monthly, then again, it would specify that there or quarterly. Once again, and normally you would also get Bian Shu number near this dateline. However, here we have a vertical placement on the left side. Here we can see it's issue 507 and also the actual date when it was published. Notice that we also have a URL, the website for this magazine that again is usually placed close to the mass tab, somewhere around there. Or also it can be close to the barcode, which usually is at the button. Now it's shortlist. We don't have a price because it's a free magazine. But instead of that, we have something that's called a pug. Now, this is indicating that it's a free magazine. And we specifically call these things pugs when they are on the corner or attached to the side of the cover, these elements should always use strong color and high contrast. So make sure that they stand out from the rest of the cover and they are there to promote exciting news incentives or promotions. So the fact that this magazine is freeze, obviously an incentive for you to pick it up and read it. So in case of this magazine, I would consider this sticker to be doing the same exact thing, what we just described. But in these cases, instead of calling it a pug, I would call it a path. Or you can also use the term qualifier or flesh. And actually the sticker effect is very commonly used. So a bit of drop shadow and maybe stronger outlines or even like a star shaped like a burst is a very commonly used in magazine covers. The examples that I have on this board are very stylish and really nicely designed. But if you look for cheaper publications, you probably would find a lot of these paths and pugs and flesh elements that just really wants you to pick up the magazine and really tries a heart cell. So you have to be careful not to overuse these type of things. Because just like everything in design less is more and a cleaner and neater look usually looks more elegant and feels more professional. 4. Magazine Cover (Part 2): Now it is worth mentioning that you don't always need a container or bounding box around a puff. You can also just have texts like here as small symbol, in this case that asterisk. So this is again, something that really makes you want to pick up this magazine and really entices you to read about the things contained in the magazine. So instead of this relating to a specific article, this is more like a general sales pitch for this particular issue. Now even though in this cover besides the mass here, this is actually the largest tax. This is not the main cover line, the main covered line, That's something that directly is connected to the main image. So in this case, I would call all of this section here the lead story line or headline, sometimes also referred to as splash or as I mentioned before, main cover line. And within the headline, you can also have additional elements like the model credit, where we actually see the name of the person in the main image. And besides the main tax, which in this case is the music that matters, we would have this smaller text or subtexts, which normally we call anchorage text or strap line or most covers, you would also get additional supporting cover lines, like in this case, this special report part here at the bottom left. And these relate to additional articles within the magazine that are not connected to the main image. These are usually best place to the edges, making sure that they don't cover up too much of the main image just to avoid the confusion and making sure that they are not mistaken to be connected to the main image. It's quite common with these supporting cover lines that you would get some buzzwords. And here it's a perfect example, this special report, but this could also be something like exclusive or plus or, and even more stuff like that. Now when every cover, the most important than largest detail you would see is the main image and this takes up usually the most part of the cover. So in this case we have Daniel Craig as James Bond. And notice that also there are some cool effects here with these shots that also in a way part of that main image. But most of the time, these images would have a person who is looking straight into the camera. That's a way to really get your attention. Because when we see someone looking at us, That's just really gets us drawn into, in this case, a magazine. And these pictures of people, I've usually a medium shot like this one here. Or they can also be a close-up with a strong crop in this case. But some magazines would use main images in a more creative way, like with stylists, we have this main character jumping over the masthead, which is quite cool. But what if creates also is a massive negative space here in the middle. Now that's also quite common with these main images, that the background be quite empty or at least out of focus or not too busy to make sure that the main character or the main subject of the photo is highlighted. But because once again, in this example, the character is all the way on the top. It just opens up that white empty space in the middle. This is a unique and clever cover design, which really proves the point that once you understand the rules, you can break them. And that's when you can create very effective designs. It's worth mentioning that the main image doesn't necessarily have to be a photograph of a person. It can also be an illustration like this. And most of the time, by the way, it can overlap the math SAT as long as it keeps it still legible or recognizable. But it can also be even more complex illustration like here, where it really takes up the whole cover. Or it can be less complex and just simply use typography. So in case of this wired issue, the three logos closed out would be considered the main image. Besides the main image, you would sometimes also have secondary images like these, which are sometimes also referred to as thumbnail images. Even these at the bottom would be considered thumbnail or secondary images. On this cover, we can also see the barcode here on the right, which is required if the magazine is sold in news agent or show, but it is not necessary if the magazine is sent to a subscriber or obviously for a digital version. And last but not least, you can also have frames like the iconic yellow frame of the National Geographic or the red frame of Time Magazine, just like a frame painting or a photograph on a wall. These also helped to make the magazine stand out when it's on the news agents stand. And it also helps to create a very clear visual margin. But it's sacrifices the size of the main image, all the additional information inside it. So everything has to be probably 10, 15% smaller than what it would be without the frame. And most of the elements that I went through in this video would be usually used consistently throughout the issues for a particular magazine, likely time apart from the masthead and the frame, that will be also placement of certain things like the dateline and the price, which would most of the time won't move between the shoes. So consistency really helps readers to quickly spot the latest issue of the magazine. But also they will learn where to find the relevant information once they have been reading that magazine for awhile. 5. Preparing the Cover Photo in Photoshop (Part 1): Once you've decided which image you want to work with, just open it in Photoshop and follow the following couple of steps to separate the person and mask it out from the original background. Now to help you get used to this method and make sure you understand how to do it. I am going to show you the same method on four different images, but I will continue using this one for the rest of the project. So let's get started. The easiest selection method is the subject option, especially because it works really well with people. So once we choose that, even though this character is quiet blended into the background, it does actually a quite good job on finding and separating it from the background, even though the hair is really dark and these details are dark, it has done a good job. The parts that we need to improve will probably be easiest by using the Quick Selection Tool, which is like a brush. So we can use the square brackets on the keyboard to increase and decrease the brush size. And then holding down Alt or Option key, we can just click a couple of times on areas that we don't need in our selection, like this one here. And let the selection snap to the edges that we want to work with. Now I can zoom in even closer. And if I don't hold down the Alt or Option key and click on areas or even paint on areas, then it's going to extend the selection. So here once again, we need to remove, so I'm holding down the Alt or Option key. And if it goes too far, then what I recommend to do is to undo the last step. And instead of using the Quick Selection Tool, use the Quick Mask instead, which can be accessed by pressing Q on the keyboard. And here we will see a visual representation of the selected and the selected areas. Anything that's not in our selection is highlighted in red. And we can actually use our normal brush tool here, which by default is going to paint v Divide, which will reveal details or add details to the selection. But in this case we need to remove details, so I'm going to swap to black. You can also do this by pressing X on the keyboard. So now we have the black. I can just paint over these areas here and make sure that we have a clean, nice edge around the year. Again, I can use the square brackets, reduce the brush size. And I'm not going to spend too much time on this because it's a small detail. But I feel like that looks already quite good. Now if we zoom back with Command or Control 0, we can see the whole selection and maybe a few more areas can be added here at the bottom. Remember switching back to white if you want to add details to the selection and using black if you want to remove from the selection, I think this leaf should also be in the selection, even though we won't be coming down this far. The most important parts are around here where we will have our title and also those graphic elements. So just to make sure that they will work, I am just going to paint over these leaves here as well on the left, just very quickly, create a rough edge there. I think it's going to work. So now that I'm ready with my selection, I can press Q on the keyboard again to switch back to seeing a normal view of the selection. And to finalize this, I am going to turn this into a layer mask. So click on the little icon here at the bottom of the Layers panel. And let's save this as a Photoshop document. And if you want to make it easier to find it, you can just type in Moscow at the end of the file name, because at the end in InDesign, we will be using both the original photo and the master version. So you will need both of them. 6. Preparing the Cover Photo in Photoshop (Part 2): Now if this workflow make sense to you and if you decided that you will be working with the same image, you can already move on to the next video. But in case you would like to see me doing the same method on the following three images, then you can stay here and watch me doing it. So once again, I am going to start with a subject selection. And in this case, it's done an almost perfect job. Again, there's just a few little mistakes here on the bag. And I think further down maybe around the trousers. We just need to refine it slightly. That's already good. Sometimes I just use the quick mask, pressing U on the keyboard just to see my selection in a little bit more contrasting way so I can judge the selection better. And yes, I believe this is ready for a mask, so I am just going to add the layer mask. And once again, I can save this as a Photoshop document. Make sure you remember where you save your files and also to add additional titles if you wish to make your work a little bit easier. Let's move on to our next image. Let's see how subjects selection works on this one. In this case, Photoshop again, has done a really good job considering that the ladies wearing a red hat and the background is predominantly red as well, is still made a very nice selection. So let's just turn this already into a mosque without any changes. And just so you can see the selection on the hair, I'm going to use the Option or Alt key and click on the Mask thumbnail here in the Layers panel, which will show us the selected details in white and the hidden details in black. And if I zoom closer, you can see there's a lot of fine details in the selection on the hair. So even though it was a complex background, Photoshop did a really good job with the subject selection. And maybe the only detail that needs a little bit of touch-up is around here. Even though this is already a layer mask, we can still continue refining it. Just make sure you have the Mosque itself selected and then switch to the brush tool and paint over the area with white. Because remember why I chose black hides? So if we paint with white, we are revealing details and we can do the same thing here on the right as well, just to make sure that all the details of the hat is going to stay visible. There may be a little bit of the hair as well here. So let's zoom back and I think the rest of the image is perfect. So we can once again save this. And this time I'm going to use the shortcut Command or Control S and just typing again, mast. And finally one more image. Just to practice, I'm going to use again the subject selection first, which again has done a great job overall. Just these bottom details need to be added. So I'm going to use the Quick Selection Tool and just quickly paint over that part. Now just to double-check, I'm going to press Q on the keyboard for Quick Mask. Have a final look at it. Yeah, I'm happy with all the areas, so I can press Q again and click on the mask and finally, save it as a Photoshop file. So you can see how quickly we managed to go through all of these images using the same method. And if you want to practice, feel free to do all of the images that are included or even experiment with your own images. By the way, these images are all from Unsplash, which is a great website and resource for high-quality free stock photos. But now that we're done in Photoshop, in the next video, we will continue working in Illustrator on the title and some graphic elements. 7. Designing the Title in Illustrator: In this lesson, we will be working in Illustrator and we will work with the following two documents, title and shapes. You can download these from directly below the video. Let's start with the title. I decided to use create as the title of my magazine. So I am going to work with those letters, but feel free to give your magazine a different title. As you can see, you have the full alphabet here so you can make up whatever title you want. And once you've decided which characters you need, use the black arrow, the selection tool to select them, and they're holding down the Alt or Option key. Click and drag to duplicate them onto the new art board on the right, I've set up this document in a way that this is the first art board which will be imported into InDesign. And if you're interested, this is something you can change. Here in the artboards panel. You can see that the alphabet is actually the second art board, even though it's here on the left side. And the title, which you see here on the right is odd board number one. So when we are going to place this Illustrator file into InDesign, it's going to use whatever is on this art board instead of the one on the left. And if you want to change the order of art boards, you just simply have to drag the Artboard names up and down here in the artboards panel. This is something we already covered earlier. I just wanted to remind you how to do it, but all we have to do is now to continue dropping the letter C here on the right. So I'm just holding down the Alt or Option key while I'm doing this. And it creates the duplicates for me. And then we can just duplicate this letter once more to the right. I'm going to press Command or Control Zero to zoom closer to this title. And now we have to make sure that these characters are aligned to each other. So first I'm going to select them all, and then from the Options bar, I will use the Vertical Align Bottom option. If you don't see the control bar in Illustrator, remember you can find it from the window menu that has the control option there. Or alternatively, you can also use the Properties panel and that also has the align options here. Now, if I want to keep my character's mind apart, I can also horizontally distribute them evenly by using this icon. The same can, again be found in the properties panel by clicking on more options, that's where you will find the Horizontal Distribute Center option. But here you even have an option to adjust the actual spacing between the objects. And this will only work if you change the alignment to key object, which will select one object, but you can always change the selection. I normally select the first character and then going into alignment. Now, we will be able to specify the distance. Let's say we want five points between them. And then I just click on Horizontal Distribute Center again, as you can see, if I reduce the distance, maybe 23 points. Again, I can move them closer to each other. But there is an issue here because this doesn't look evenly distributed. And that is due to the unique shape of each letter. And the most obvious one is the a and the T, where it seems to have a huge empty space or negative space here. However, the actual physical distance between the edges of the bounding boxes of these two characters are actually the same as the others. Because if you consider the a to be a square or a block, then you can see there's not much space between it and the next letter. This problem usually occurs when you have characters like a, V, W, or the round ones like O and C can also be problematic. So whenever you prepare titles, especially when using more stylized graphic letters like these, you will need to visually balanced out the spacing between them. And this method is called kerning, and we will learn more about this later on. But for now, all we have to do is to move these letters closer. Let's just select T and E. And holding down the Shift key, I will start moving them towards the a. And when I get close I can see I could even overlap them if I wanted to and if I want to change the order of them. So having tea in front of a all I would have to do is to go to the Layers panel, select the letter T in this case, and just make sure it's moved all the way to the top. So then it can be in front of a or another technique. If I undo this last step and maybe zoom a little bit closer, is to do it by selecting the letter and just right-click, arrange, bring to front, or notice there's also shortcuts for these arrangement options. I actually prefer these letters to slightly overlap, maybe not this much, something like that. Then let's move E as well closer once again, we can use the right-click arrange, bring to front, or dragging it up in the layers panel. And now let's move all three of these closer to the E, and then we can also move the other letters closer. In this case, I can keep it probably around here. And then C can come also fairly close. Now it's always important to look at the whole verb together, and I think this looks quite good. So I am happy to use this in InDesign and to make sure it's prepared for it properly, I will also do one last thing. So having the word selected, I'm going to choose Object. Artboards Fit to Selected Art. So that way there is no negative space or empty space around the title, which will give us more control in InDesign and the bounding box 1.5, that unnecessary big empty space around it. Now you might notice another strange thing here, especially now we have the art board so tightly cropped down to the word. And that is that the C character is slightly taller than the other letters. That's another unique thing about the alphabet in general. And normally fonts compensate for these round characters like see all q, by making them slightly taller than the rest. Because if they had exactly the same size and put next to each other, they will feel slightly smaller. I'm not sure whether you can tell, but it does feel slightly smaller now than the rest, even though it's perfectly aligned to them. So to make sure that this title works, I'm going to undo this last step, keep that slightly larger C, but instead of aligning my letters all the way at the bottom, I'm going to move them slightly up by pressing the up arrow on the keyboard once or twice. I think just simply pressing it once is already good. This way the size difference is less obvious. Now we can save our work. So I'm just going to go to File, Save As. And I recommend saving this as a separate file. Don't overwrite the original exercise file in case you want to go back and start again. So in this case I'm just going to type in, create and save it. Once the dialog box comes up, just click Okay. 8. Organizing in Illustrator: So our title is ready. Now we can move on to the other document called shapes. And here we have a fun and exciting composition using some shapes. But when you look at the layers panel, it's a little bit of a mess, so there's no organization and it will be quite hard to move things around in case we want to make changes. So for instance, if I want it to move these three arrows a bit further down, I won't be able to do it quickly because I would have to select them one by one. So they are not grouped together. As I said, they are not organized currently, even if I decide to make a marquee selection, I might accidentally select other items as well at the same time. The task here is to organize everything using the layers panel and the Selection tool. So I'm going to start with these arrows on the left side. Once I selected them, I will group them together by using Command or Control G will repeat the same thing here on the right side, Command or Control G and keep an eye on the layers panel. You can see how things are already starting to look better. I will also group those little dots there on the left side together. And also these ones here. We can group together. Now when it comes to shapes that are overlapping, other shapes, you can do the following methods. So select the dots with a marquee selection. But then if there's anything else that was behind, also added to the selection, just shift, click on that object once more. So shift can add or remove items from a selection. Now that I have only the dots selected, I can press Command or Control G on that as well. And now, just to make things even more organized, I'm going to group similar objects together. So let's start with these circles. I'm going to select one and then Shift-click on another. Shift-click. Shift-click, continue until I have all of them selected. I can see the selection highlighted here with the little blue squares. And I can also just double-check on the thumbnails that there's no other circles. So I can use Command or Control G to group them together. We can even rename this group and call it circles just to make it easier to find them. Because now the thumbnail image doesn't really tell us what we have inside this group until we actually click on it and it opens up. So now that's much more organized. Let's do the same with these other shapes. And in this case, because they are the same color, we can even use the magic one tool with which if we click on a single shape, it will find all the other shapes using the same color. There is actually one additional shape that looks similar, just uses a different color. That's why the magic one, we didn't select it. So to add this, I'm going to switch back to the selection tool and shift click on it. So now they are all selected. I can press Command or Control G, and again, rename this group as lines. So let's just check, turn it off and turning it back on. Now I noticed in the layers panel that there's actually one more circle. If I click on it, we can find where it is. And the reason why we couldn't see it is because it's the same color as the shape behind it. So to make sure this is visible, I am going to move it a bit further out, maybe placing it somewhere here on the outside. And to keep things organized, I'm going to drop this into the circles group. Now things look much more organized, but since we started naming our groups, I am going to also call these actually arrows. And then just copy this title and place it on these other groups as well. Good thing in Illustrator, you can use the same name on multiple objects. It won't give you any shoes. So I will do the same thing here, dots and then these adults again. And I intentionally keep these as separate elements and not grouped them together because this way it is easier to access them and move them around. But of course, if I wanted to, I could still select the three groups of arrows and press Command or Control G again, which will create a group of additional groups inside it. And you can end up having several subgroup levels in Illustrator sometimes when you work on very complex illustrations. But in this case it's a fairly simple illustration. I don't think it is necessary. So I'm going to remove this large group by using Command or Control Shift G. And finally, just these shapes at the bottom are easier to select from the layers panel. So I'm going to click on the little circle and then Shift-click on the others. So all of these rectangles in the background and then press Command or Control G to group them together and just call it rectangles. Now we can check if we turn this off, these are all the other elements in our composition. And then again, we can check circles, lines, arrows. You can drag over icons to quickly turn them on and off. And again, the dots, these three groups at the bottom. So this is much more organized now and it will be much easier to come back to it and make changes once we place it into InDesign, make sure you save this file again separately. Don't overwrite your original file. I'm going to call it organised. And now we are ready to jump into InDesign in the next lesson, where we will put everything together. 9. Indesign Composition (Part 1): Now that we have everything ready in InDesign, we can start by creating a new document. I'm going to use an A4 portray size document. So this is the template here. You can find it under print A4. Just make sure you set the orientation to portray. We won't need the facing pages option since we are only going to work on the cover. So you can take that off. And for the margins, I'm going to set 15 millimeters on all the edges to make sure that they are the same, you can use the little chain icon incase. It's not turned on by default. If you want to see a preview of the document, just check preview and you can take a look even before you click on Create. So for instance, if I change the margins, I can see it live updating there. And I'm happy with this, so I can click on Create. Now, for this project, it will be important to have the following three panels or pan layers, paragraph styles, and swatches. It's completely up to you. Where do you want to place them on the interface? But remember, you can find them all from the window menu, paragraph styles you will find on their styles. Layers is just here and swatches is under color. So now that we have everything ready, Let's start by placing in the original image. We will do that by using the File menu and choose Place. Remember our shortcut Command or Control D, that's another one you can use here. And there's my cover photo. Just have to click and drag and I already align it to the edges of the page. But when I zoom out using Control or Command Minus, I can also move it up or down to see how it fits on the page. So the aspect ratio of this image is slightly different to the A4 page format. And I can press W on the keyboard to see how it's going to end up once it's actually trimmed or crop footprint. Within this view, it's a little bit easier to tell whether we need to move it up or down. I feel like moving it up. We are expected in this case, I'm going to press W again to go back to the normal view. Zoom a little bit closer. And I will already named this first layer as the image, or we can call it photo. And I will actually duplicate this whole layer by right-clicking on it and choosing Duplicate Layer photo. This will create another layer with the same image inside it. So we can see it is exactly the same, but this new one, I'm going to rename and call it. Let's just type in last photo. And I will change its color to maybe yellow, just so it looks different. These highlight colors of the layers will actually show up when you make selections in the document. And since they are on top of each other, I am currently selecting the image inside the mask photo layer. But if I hold down Command or Control and click once more, I can select what's underneath it. And that's the same image. On the other layer, we can see that the bounding box color changed to blue, which is corresponding to the color of that layer. Remember, anytime you want to change these colors, just double-click and there you will be able to change the color. Now what we need to actually do is to select the one on top, the one we call master photo. And by going to File Place, we can select our mask image, the Photoshop document. And by having that frame selected originally InDesign already replaced the contents of it with the Mazda image. We can even see that the name changed here. And if I turn off the visibility of the other image underneath, which has the original background, we can already see that the mask version is placed on top of it and they are perfectly aligned to each other. Now I can close these layers to keep things simple, and I will create an additional layer which is going to be used for our title and shapes. And I will make sure that this layer is placed in between these two. So title and shapes underneath the mask photo, but above the photo, having this title and shapes layer highlighted, make sure that whatever I'm going to place will end up on this layer. So this is our current drawing layer, as InDesign calls it. But I also have to make sure that there's no frames selected. Or even better, we can even look our master photo layer and also the photo layer to make sure that we don't accidentally move things around there. So now that we've done that, we can go to the File menu and choose place. And this time let's bring our title n. So the one that we saved separately as an Illustrator file and click and drag and try to align it to the margins in the document are those purple lines in case you make it too small or too big, you can always use Command or Control shift, drag a corner point to increase or decrease its size. And the cool thing is that if I move this title down, you can already see how it goes behind the person in the image, or even behind those leaves at the bottom. And that is all thanks to the masking that we've done and the clever preparation of layers here in InDesign. So I can just move this up a bit. Again. I press W just to check how this looks. I feel like that works really well. So now we can bring in the shapes as well. Once again, makes sure you don't have anything selected. You can just click somewhere outside and then go to File Place again. And this time we will bring in our organised version of the shapes and click and drag to place it in. 10. Indesign Composition (Part 2): Now, even though these shapes were created in a vertical format, we can always rotate them around here in InDesign and holding down the Shift key, we can also make sure it is constrained to a 90 degrees angle. And if you wanted to scale it up or down, just use the command or Control Shift drag technique. I will also align this to the margins just for consistency and visual alignment. And to have a better look at this, I'm going to press W to go into the preview mode. Now I can move it up or down just to see how it works. And we can also use these icons here in the Options bar to flip it horizontally or vertically to check which orientation looks best, I feel like probably this one is the best out of all of them and maybe we can even move it slightly further up. And the best thing about using the Creative Cloud applications together in a seamless workflow like this, is that it allows us to be able to go back and make changes very easily. So for instance, if I wanted to move one of these shapes around, all I have to do is to hold down the Alt or Option key and double-click on it, which will take us straight back into Illustrator, where for instance, we want to see how it would look if we don't have the rectangles in the background. So we can easily just hide those and keep only the smaller shapes in. So if I go to the File menu and save this and then jump back to InDesign. We will already see it updated. In this case, I feel like the shapes are actually really fun. So I'm going to go back to Illustrator, turn them back on, and then save the document again to see it. Once again updating in InDesign, but sometimes in design might not show you the changes straight away. In these cases, the quick fix is to go to the Links panel, which you can find from the window menu links. And they're just look for a little exclamation mark and simply double-click on it that will refresh the file. Usually you get this modification error or synchronization error that you can just simply fix by refreshing the link to the source. Fine. Now similarly to this, if we spot any issues with our cover image, we can also fix that directly from within InDesign. Like in this case, I feel like this part of the hair needs a little bit of refinement. We just have to make sure that that layer is accessible. So I'm going to lock the title and shapes layer, unlock the master photo layer, select that image and holding down Option or Alt key, double-clicking on it will open it straight back into Photoshop where we can zoom closer. And the easiest way to fix it would be to switch to the mosque View Option or Alt key. Clicking on the mask thumbnail will give us that black and white view. Here we can use the Brush tool and by pressing X on the keyboard, I switch to black. And with that, I can just paint over these details that I don t need. Maybe also just tidy up here a little bit like so. We can also switching to white. Just paint over this little detail here around the ear because anything that's black is slightly see-through and we don't want the year to not to be fully visible or solid. So yeah, I think that works quite nicely now. So we can switch back to viewing the image by Alt or Option, clicking on the mask, and then saving this here in Photoshop, we'll again have that direct link and update the image in InDesign. And I am very happy with how things are coming together. So in the next video, we can finalize everything by adding all the missing copies. 11. Formatting the Cover Lines in InDesign (Part 1): For this part of the workflow, I am going to switch back to the normal view by pressing W. And I will also lock the most photo layer. And instead I'm going to create an additional layer which can sit on top of everything else that we created so far. And this is going to be the cover lines, which is going to go here at the bottom. But before we use that, I will actually revisit the title and shapes layer. So I'm going to unlock that and select it because I would like to place in our tagline and dateline just underneath the title. And I don't want these to overlap the person in the cover image. So they might also slightly overlap with the hair, but we will see how much space we need. So having this layer selected, I will use now the type tool and click and drag to define a new text frame. And in here, I'm just going to type in graphic design. But currently this is hardly visible because of the color used. I will change the color to paper so that keeps it white. It's much more visible now. And I'm going to use the same font as we used in the previous project. So that should already be synchronized. If you finish that one, It's the Futura. And in this case I will use bold and also I believe it would look good to keep this in all caps. So all capital letters, that's the icon that you can find here in the character formatting options. I think this can be slightly bigger as well, so let's just increase the size of it and then we can check if it looks better by moving it further up. Yeah, I feel like that looks good. Also. I just align it to the margins so it's nicely aligned to the main title. And to keep things easier, I'm going to select this text frame and holding down Alt or Option key with the selection tool, I can duplicate it and move it to the right side. If you want to make sure it's aligned to the other texts frame, just make sure you wait for the smart guides to show up those green lines. Or you can also use the shift key to keep it moving only horizontally and drag it until it reaches the other margin on the right side. Now this is going to be our dateline. So here I'm just going to type in something like issue 54 and then the date which is just randomly, let's say October 2022. And because there's not enough space here, I'm going to select all of these texts. There's a shortcut for that, That's Command or Control a, which can be very handy, especially when you don't see all of the texts anymore because there's not been a space to show it. So having it all selected, I can just reduce the size. And yeah, I just added an additional number to that at the end. But this deadline is actually not as important as the tagline, so I will also change the style of it. So instead of bold, I'm going to switch to book. And I will also remove the all caps option from it. And I think that looks good. Now I just need to make sure it's aligned to the right again to make sure it's visually aligned to the text. So using a line right from the paragraph formatting options. And now we have both texts frames ready to make sure that they are aligned well to each other. I am going to select their frames and double-click on the bottom center point to make sure that there is no empty space underneath them. And this way I can drag this text frame a bit further down to make sure that their baseline or the bottom edge is aligned to the tagline on the left. Let's just see this without all the bounding boxes, I press W on the keyboard to switch to normal view. And also I zoom out a bit to see it from a distance. Yes, I am happy with how that looks. So now we can continue with our cover lines at the bottom. For this, I'm going to copy this text frame since we are going to use the same font. So I'll just select that and press Command or Control C. And then I will lock the title and shapes layer and select the cover line's layer where I will press Command or Control V to paste this text in. You can also find this option here, paste and let's move this text frame down. So zoom a little bit closer and we can switch back to normal view to see our margin by pressing W on the keyboard. And then let's just increase the size of this text frame because we will need more copy in here. And the first thing I'm going to do is to switch to the type tool and change the alignment to laugh. Now the copy for this part I prepared as a text file which you can download from below the video. And once you have it downloaded, all you have to do is to select the text in here and go to the File menu and choose place. Similarly to placing in images, you can also bring in some copy from text files or Word documents. And once you accept this, it will replace the text. But unfortunately the formatting is also gone, but that's not a difficult thing to fix. We can just select our texts. Also. Choose Futura PT book. And we can increase the size a bit, but we will do a couple of additional things here. First of all, we have covered lines and supporting lines. So design theory, creative projects, and tools of the trade are the ones that I would like to have as the main cover lines. So they should be more dominant while the other three will be the supporting cover lines. So let's just establish the styling for the first governor line. First of all, I would like this to be all capitals. And instead of book, I want this to be maybe Demi, so that will make it thicker. I might want this to be slightly larger as well, so maybe go up to 22 points. Now, this is much closer to what I've imagined, but I am not going to be a 100% until I see it on all the three cover lines. So it is best to save this as a paragraph style that way. First of all, we can easily apply it on the other two, but also it will be much easier to come back to it and make changes. So instead of doing it always three times, we'll have to just do it only once. 12. Formatting the Cover Lines in InDesign (Part 2): So the way you create a paragraph style is by having the text selected. And then either going to the Paragraph Styles panel and holding down Alt or Option, clicking on this little icon here to create a new style. Or you can go to the paragraph formatting controls in the options bar. And there you can click on this icon and choose New paragraph style. Once this dialog box comes up, you can call these cover lines and make sure you have the apply styles to selection checked and also the preview checked. You don't need to use CC library option for now, so you can take that off. Let's click Okay to create this. And you can see it's showing up here in the Paragraph Styles panel already. The good thing is now that we can just select the next cover line, creative projects and simply click on cover lines to apply the formatting. You can do the same with tools of the trade and again, clicking on cover lines to apply that formatting. I like how this looks. Now we have definitely a clear difference between cover lines and the supporting cover lines. But I would like to have some separation between them. So some spacing between the groups of texts. And to be able to do this, all we have to do is to update our paragraph style slightly by right-clicking on it and choosing edit cover lines. And here, under indents and spacing, we can find an option called space before. Now once I start increasing that, you can already see how it separates the groups for us. I think six millimeters is good enough. So I'm going to just click okay. Now to be able to do the same with the supporting cover lines, it would be worth saving that as a paragraph style as well. So let's just highlight the first instance and Alt or Option click on the new paragraph style icon. We can now type in supporting cover lines. Same options apply here. So we can just click okay and then make sure that it's applying to these other instances as well. So we can either select it from the drop-down and apply it like that, or selecting it from the Paragraph Styles panel. Now that we have this also set up as a paragraph style, we can easily right-click on it, edited and make changes to even things like the character size. So we can go into basic character formats and start increasing or decreasing that attribute. And we can see it updating live thanks to the Preview option here on the left. I think the 1800s was actually already good. I'm not going to make any changes here. Just click Okay. And finally, just to make things more colorful and also consistent, I'm going to use the colors from these shapes in the background on the text at the bottom, so on the cover lines. So for this, we will need to bring in the colors swatches that I already prepared in advance. So why do you need to do is to jump to the swatches panel here in InDesign and from the panel menu, choose Load Swatches. Amongst the download the project files, you can find the swatches ASE file, that stands for Adobe Swatch Exchange. And it's a great A5 format to easily move colors between Adobe applications. So this one we can just import directly into InDesign, and that will create a new color group here. Later on we will learn how to use CC libraries to be able to work with colors more universally and even easier than this. But this is also a useful technique. That's why I wanted to show you. I'm going to select the first line of the tax using the type tool. We have to make sure in the layers panel that the cover line's layer is accessible so it's not logged. And then we can just highlight the first line. And by going back to swatches. For this, I will use yellow. Then for the second one, I will use maybe this cyan color. And then for the last one, we can maybe use that pink. That again is the same as the shapes in the background. So now let's take a look at the final design. We just zoom out, press W and now seeing it together, maybe this text frame can come down ever so slightly. I feel happy with generally how it looks, but there's one tiny thing that I'm going to make a change to. That is the title is even though it is aligned to the right margin, it doesn't actually look like it, since the three-dimensional shape is so dark against the dark background, it doesn't have enough contrast. It doesn't feel right. So we have to visually balanced things out, which is often different to physical alignment. So I'm going to unlock the title layer, select this and holding down Command or Control and Shift, drag out until it feels right. We could even move this slightly to the left again, having the sea just going slightly over the left margin will make things feel more visually balanced here on the right side. Yeah, so something like that. I feel looks much better. And Shift W, we can even have a full screen preview and lag before for wrapping up, we have to make sure that this is saved as an InDesign file. I already went ahead and gave it a name, so I just have to save it again. And I recommend to save the InDesign file in the same folder where your other assets are, the Illustrator files and the Photoshop files. That way you can make sure that the whole project can be easily archived. But in case you didn't store your files originally in a folder, you can also use a very handy feature at the end in InDesign called package. You can find this under the File menu, which will produce a new version of all the files involved in this project. So that is the InDesign project file, a PDF for print and all the Photoshop and Illustrator files. So once I click on package, I'm just going to call this final version. That's going to be the folder name. And you can see these are the options included. Once I package it, we can see the folder created with the InDesign file, the PDF next to it, and IDML file, which is a backward compatible version of the InDesign document. In case someone needs to use an older version, they will still be able to work with this file and all the assets neatly placed into a separate folder called links. And we have an additional folder even for the fonts used in this project, I highly recommend always to save a package from InDesign at the end of a project because this is the safest way of archiving your work. And to make sure that you don't end up missing any assets that you've worked with. 13. Conclusion: Well done for completing this project. I hope you had fun working on this magazine cover design and that you've learned, again how to use the three Adobe design applications together in case you follow me step-by-step and recreate it everything exactly in the same way. And you feel like you would like to practice a bit more techniques that we covered. Now is the time maybe to be a bit more creative and pick another image for the cover and also to come up with a different title. And besides changing these, you can also feel creative to add additional elements like a sticker or even secondary images, a skyline, or even add more visual interest by using the same shapes that we had in the background and pop a few of them in the foreground. In case you are working with other photos, you might even need to change the colors of the shapes to ensure that there is enough contrast. And don't forget to share your final design or designs under the projects and resources section.