One of the tasks that sometimes falls onto the Art Director if neither the publisher or the in-house team have a marketing art team is screenshots, box art or magazine covers.
This is an example of designing for a magazine cover in a very short timescale and with no information apart from the magazines name.
The first thing I did was a quick search for the magazine in question and to see how they generally layout the cover design.
The image left seemed to be a pretty standard design for the magazine.
Now that I knew the basic layout and proportions I looked at the Alien screenshots that I had been given to work with.
Here are the first round of composition and screen shot options that I presented to the team.
After receiving the feedback I selected this screen capture (below) from the game to start with. I try not to cheat too much so I concentrated on polishing what was there and adding only a few elements, here is the untouched screen capture I worked with.
After turning the image to create a composition which worked well with the magazines typical layout, I added some more atmospheric elements, adjusted the lighting, added muzzle flashes as well as a few extra elements and I ended up with the following images.
I never found out if they used the image or not, but such is the life of a busy art director.
