Cosmopolitan Magazine is one of my favorite magazines. It was the only magazine I subscribed to in college and is still a favorite of mine to pick up before a long flight. I understand it’s not amazing literary quality, but it’s definitely a lot of fun! So when in ART109 we were asked to recreate a famous magazine cover to the best of our abilities, I knew which magazine I’d choose. Originality, while also sticking to the design of the magazine, was very important both to me and my professor, so I decided to create something I had never seen before – a Cosmo with a green background (my favorite color).
To start, I looked over my embarrassingly extensive collection of old magazines and jotted down a list of common themes across several issues. Many had: the name of the cover model, circular stamps advertising content or giveaways, a large number, emojis, and an outrageously huge variety of fonts. The articles advertised on the cover were usually focused on several main topics: sex, exercise, food, fashion, and work / budgeting. Keeping all of that in mind, I created a pretty spot-on Cosmo cover, in my opinion.
As you can see, I quickly realized that the authenticity of the cover also required a consistent color theme to avoid looking too busy, as well as a flat background color. The other issue I encountered was that we had to choose all of our images from Creative Commons that were free for commercial use and labeled for reuse with modifications. To find pictures of celebrities that are not copyrighted is a quest in and of itself, and it severely limited my options. I would have preferred to find a full-body, sexier photograph to use as the cover image, but this one worked fine in the long run.