Jun
1
Written by:
Jason
Wednesday, June 01, 2011 3:37 PM
The idea behind the cover was to be simple and stylish with a clear-cut message; something that would easily be spotted from a distance but not too garish. I liked the idea of creating a mosaic with past issue covers but it had been done before so I was wary about how to approach the method.
Having access to all 50 issues was pretty handy and that enabled me to put them all together on one page. Unfortunately having all the different colours side-by-side was presenting a mixed result and not the desired effect so I made the decision that only a select few would be presented in full colour.
I already knew that I wanted to create a large ‘50’ in the centre of the page so now it was a case of how I wanted that 50 to look. Researching anniversaries, I found that the 50th is represented by something gold and decided that this would go well as a trim around the number.
As with every designer, you’re always learning and before attempting to create the gold trim that I wanted I decided to do some research and see if there were any online tutorials to create this effect.
PSD tuts+ is a fantastic resource site full of tutorials and inspirational work from designers all over the world and they often provide free help guides on a variety of techniques found within Photoshop. Fortunately for me, the site had exactly the tutorial I was look for and I was able to follow the instructions and apply a similar method to 
create my gold trim number fifty.
Once the fifty was completed, it was added to the background and a base was created for it to rest on. My inspiration for the base was actually from my iPhone design and was relatively easy to re-create. A couple of simple shapes made transparent and then flipped the number fifty to create a reflection.
The next stage was to bring all the elements together; the gold fifty and the background it was to sit on. Once added the number all but disappears onto the background so to enable it to stand out on the page I blacked out the remaining HardCopy issues around the fifty and added the article titles.
