Building the dream

Last week we promised that we would explain the process behind our gorgeous new cover look and here it is...

When we created Glory Days we wanted to seek out and celebrate the extraordinary. We chose to theme each issue and decided that in order for readers to be fully immersed in the experience, we would try to present the information as it would have been presented in the time it was being presented. While not being our first themed issue, the Hollywood one is perhaps the one most comprehensively devoted to the topic, a taste of things to come.

This issue, therefore, has a refreshed look that is in-keeping with the Hollywood theme and is the beginning of an exciting journey into the visual vocabulary of many exciting design trends that Glory Days is going to be delving into over the coming years, as we reference original source material from the eras and topics we all love from the past.

For the latest cover, we took our main inspiration from images of original 40s and 50s film star magazines. To achieve the hyper-coloured rosy hued look, we edited the original Miss T Pinups image of the lovely Miss Victory Violet, in a similar way to how it would have been done back then.

The most notable change we made was the colour overlay on her dress, which would originally have been done with photographic tints. If you look closely at the actual cover you will see that the pink overlay is imperfect around the edge of the dress. While to our modern eyes, used to photo-shopped perfection, this may seem wrong, the effect was an intentional move on our part to imbue the illusion of the print techniques that were used back in the 1940s. This colour also makes her rosy cheeks and lips sing in the same way that the lips of the ladies on the covers of the magazines above do.

Other effects included pushing up all the colours in the photograph to the point where the image has the same hyper-real, saturated colour effect as most of the early Technicolor movies had, thanks to the quality of the film on which those movies were shot. The result is a vivid and vibrant cover shot that almost floats off the page.

We're excited about experimenting with many other design techniques used yesterday, to bring our covers to life today.