[Create Colors] Hold on! Don't fill this with the same 69% Black. Let's give it a fresh lime green color. Go to Edit>Colors... in the menus. A dialog box listing existing colors displays on your screen. Click on 'New' and give your new color swatch a name, 'Lime Green'. In the second dialog-box that opens up, choose 'CMYK' as the Color Model. This closely follows the inks of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, used in your desktop printer and in printing plants, that mix inks to create new colors. With the sliders at the bottom, give C:69%, M: 10%, Y:100%, and K: 0%.

[Locked Bands] Click OK in this dialog box, and then click OK again in the Colors dialog box, where you'll notice your new color added. Go back to your page, click on the small square you just created, and in the 'Colors' tab of Properties palette, give it a stroke of None, and a fill of LimeGreen, at 100% opacity. You cover should look like the screenshot here, with all the bands for text.

One last thing. Select each semi-transparant band individually, and in the Properties palette, in the 'X, Y, Z' tab, click on the icon of the padlock at the bottom. This ensures you accidentally do not move or resize each locked object.

Similarly, lock the CoverPicture Frame as well, and the green square, using this padlock. Also, uncheck 'Text flows around frame' for each of these rectangles. This keeps text that will overlap the rectangles, from jumping away from it.

Working With Layers On A Page

[Why We Need Layers] We are going to format the text for the magazine's masthead, the headline, and the subhead. Imagine if this magazine is published in several languages. One way to then produce this magazine would be to recreate the magazine layout for each language. The other way, is to have the text for each language on another layer. Think of layers like transparant sheets that overlap one another. You could hide or view layers, for example: hide the English text layer, and show the Hindi text layer.

Layers bring a lot of convenience into page-design. For our magazine, I will keep the background image and bands in one layer, and have the text contained in another layer. Go to Tools>Layers. In the dialog box, you will see one existing layer, that contains all your objects so far. Uncheck the 'eye' icon to the right of this, and all elements of this layer disappear, leaving you with your empty page.

Click inside the name of this layer, and change it to 'Bg Photo'. Click the bottom-left icon, that adds a new layer on top of the existing layer. Change the name of this layer to 'CoverText'. Make sure this layer is highlighted, so Scribus knows whatever elements you create will exist on this layer. Ensure the 'eye' icon is checked so you can view your layer.

[Enter Text in a Text Frame] Ensure the CoverText layer is highlighted in Layers. Click on the the text-frame in tools and drag a text frame across the MastheadBand. For the moment, make the text frame as wide as the page and nearly double the height of the MastheadBand. Click the 'Story Editor' icon in Tools. This is next to the 'Edit Frame Content' icon. In the screenshot here, it is circled in orange. A dialog box displays, where you can enter the text you wish to have published in the text frame. Think of the Story Editor dialog box as a mini note-pad or word-processor for each text frame. This is the second-most important dialog box in Scribus, after the Properties dialog box we saw earlier. Type the text: “FreedomYug” in the Story Editor. Then click on the File menu inside the Story Editor, and choose 'Save and Exit.' This publishes your text into the text frame, and exits the Story Editor from your screen.

[Make Text Look Beautiful] 'FreedomYug' will look attractive if the gaps between the letters are reduced, and if the text fits into the MastHeadBand. The overall gap between letters is called 'Tracking.' To reduce this tracking, right-click on the text frame, and from the pop-up menu, choose 'Show Properties'. In 'X, Y, Z' uncheck 'Text flows around frame'. On the buttons at the top of this dialog box, click on 'Text'.