Front cover - final feedback

After following suggestions from the feedback of version one of my front cover and continuing with its creation, I am now happy with the result. However, I needed to make sure I received final feedback from members of my target audience before evaluating it in great detail and producing a finished product. I asked the same four people to comment with their opinion on my changes and progress, as well as anything they thought I should do to further improve. 

I got very positive feedback on the following:

• the colour scheme - 'understated and professional'
• the QR code - 'nice touch'
• the main image - 'powerful and draws in your target audience'
• my font choice - 'really like the font used and how clear everything is'

They also picked up on the changes I had made to the cover lines and how much better they look after adding extra stories and making them more varied in terms of size, colour and style. It was mentioned that there is still a large amount of white text at the top of the magazine and I should consider changing this. The only other suggestion for further improvement was adding a selling line, but I did experiment with this during my progression from version one to version two and found that it was not practical because of my main image - the masthead fits perfectly and cannot move any closer to the top of the cover without being cut off, meaning there is no room for a cover line above the masthead and below it would involve covering the image or risk cutting most of the tag line out. I have justified this choice with the fact that many music magazine covers I looked at, including Kerrang!, Rock Sound and NME do not have selling lines visible on all issues of their magazine. 

I am now going to move onto the development of my contents page, but will be continuing to make small changes to my front cover following this feedback and my own evaluation so I can create a final version at the end of this whole process.