ELLE new cover and the excellent Fan&Art Magazine in progress

Carefully study the graphic design of a magazine, pick up the characteristics and create your own cover of a new edition. The second part of the project is to elaborate an idea of a new, nonexisting magazine and to design its cover. Have a look at how DP-student Marie-Therese Julin dressed a new edition of the ELLE magazine cover and filled a gap in the world of magazines with her inspiring idea Fan&Arts Magazine. I really want to read it! Here is her own story...

– I chose to make a cover of Elle Magazine. I think almost everyone is familiar with this magazine and it has its own version all over the world. They look very similar but I have noticed small differences. In my cover I tried to follow the graphic profile of Swedish Elle.


I looked at old magazines of ELLE that I had lying around and for more inspiration I found a couple of scanned issues online. The first things that hit me were that they use two-three colors on every cover, the background is often white and there is always a headline between either E and L or L and E. There is always a female model or actress on the cover.

What I did first was to copy the ELLE logotype. I found a picture of it online and used the magic wand in Photoshop to mark the letters. I then colored them in green (a color I picked up from Keira Knightley’s dress). In InDesign I added all my made up headlines, and small details such as www.elle.se in the first E and price information.

– Fanart is an online phenomenon and it’s growing fast. A simple definition of fanart is to say it is art of famous people. There are already millions of websites and tutorials about fanart but I have never heard of a magazine. So I decided to create Fan&Arts Magazine. Its main target group is everyone between ages 15 and 30 who are interested in making, learning and/or looking at fanart. It is planned to be released four times a year and is therefore pretty extensive.


Each issue will focus on one technique and it will consist of tutorials, examples, stories, and much more. The issue I decided to make focuses on Popart. I have never worked with this technique before but enjoyed making the cover so I’m sure I’ll make more popart inspired fanart in the future.