For my Vague Magazine layout, I decided to go with a fall-themed cover. I love to camp in the eastern Sierras, so I used one of my own vacation photos for the backdrop. This one was taken at Mono Lake.

 

The first thing I did was lay out the guides and identify the center and edges of the page. Next, I selected an appropriate image for backdrop, and used the crop tool to make my pic fit on the artboard. As the image features a lot of blue, I took 3 prominent analogous shades and contrasted them with their opposing color on the color wheel (the burnt orange) by making colored rectangles with the rectangle tool. 

I had decided early on that I would be using an autumn orange background, so I looked for a photo that contained 3 analogous colors directly opposed to my orange. Next, I wanted the image to look like a Polaroid, and jump off the page so I created a white border using the rectangle tool. Drop shadow centered at 90 degrees and low opacity was used to float the Polaroid. 

Since this is a parody cover, I chose a font that closely resembles the actual Vogue font (Engravers Monotype) but is of course a knock-off. I contrasted the vaguely vogue font with the condensed medium Noto Sans sans-serif font, and these are the only 2 fonts that appear. I used some simple layer style effects to bring the fonts to life, with a low opacity drop shadow. 

I found a suitable model for my theme in the adobe stock images and imported her using the select and mask tool. A simplifying trick here is to use the cut and paste feature once you have selected and manipulated the subject, saving time and mess on the artboard. Note that this will also work great as a means of importing simply from other applications like firefly. I scaled her to fit the scene using the transform tool and my guides. 

I chose an image that was shot around the same time of day and had similar lighting conditions to my background, so that I wouldn't have to do much light correction. I used the AI generative fill to produce the QR code. I scaled and positioned my model so that she would be centered on the page, with her raised arms forming a frame for the blurbs.  

I didn't go fancy with the title fonts because Vogue doesn't do that, and I wanted to match their style as closely as possible. Did you notice that I couldn't decide if she should wear shorts or pants? Her legs were generated with AI.