Heard of Layers magazine? No, I hadn’t either. That was until I registered my Adobe Creative Suite 4 software with Adobe and they offered me a free, three-month subscription as a gift for registering my software.

The magazine describes itself as a “How to magazine for everything Adobe” and is available both in digital and hard copy. If you select the three-month subscription gift from Adobe, they allow you to download the latest three issues in digital format which you can view onscreen using a software app called Zinio Reader.

I downloaded my three free issues and started browsing through them – to be honest, it’s a pretty good magazine with some interesting tips and tricks and articles provided by professionals who use Adobe’s software.

Each issue they run a really interesting feature called “Design Makeover”. Basically, the publishers of the magazine take a particular piece of existing design (which has been submitted in by the owner), that is serious need of a refresh and ask three designers to provide a ‘design makeover’. The subject of the article can be anything ranging from a website, magazine layout, book cover, piece of packaging or CD cover etc etc.

I viewed this as a great opportunity to get a piece of my design work out there and hopefully generate some leads. So I contacted Layers magazine and made them aware that I would be interested in being a contributing designer to this article.

Low and behold, within the space of a month or so, they asked if I’d have a look at doing a makeover on a company logo and website layout that had been sent in. Below is the before and after…

Before.

After.