Construction of Front Cover

For the past few days, I have been working on creating the front cover.
I've inserted images below of the post-production process:

At the very beginning, I originally planned to use the masthead which can be seen in the screenshot above. However, I realized it does not fit the conventional format of magazines that publish contents on multi-genre.  

With that in mind, I decided to change the masthead's look. I went for a very simple logotype: with a single letter, I used the letter 'M' which stands for Music, letting the audience know all types of music genres are supported by this publisher. As you can see, the masthead is still placed at the top but is now moved to the left-hand side corner of the front cover because, from my research, I found that this is the conventional place as seen in magazines such as Q, NMe, and XXL. Inspiration has come from those magazines also with the use of red in the background of the masthead and white for the text itself. 

By receiving feedback, I noticed that the masthead's font does not actually completely fit with the main image although it is bold and big, I decided to go for a bolder, edgier font rather than leaving it with a clean touch because this isn't common in the magazines I am taking inspiration from. By adding a dot next to the letter 'M' also emphasizes the powerful masthead and I definitely think that the final design of my masthead will be very effective in grabbing the audience's attention as it's now appropriately used to represent them: has a strong personality, and the ability to grab the spotlight in any setting. 

The colour scheme is very trendy and current  as it consists of 'modern' red, white, black, and grey. I've made the right decision of following and implementing a line in red underneath every artist that is mentioned on the front cover because this will be a way to follow the masthead's background colour and also to use this line as a unique element (from other music magazines) by using it throughout other pages in my magazine as a sense of 'brand identity'.
The screenshot above showcases that I've explored around with the possible layouts for the front cover. I chose to go with the second one because I don't want the surroundings to be very busy as I was originally planning to keep it simple because this magazine will be of many genres but it's just that this particular project I am focusing on will be based on alternative R&B.

This is the final design of my front cover.