Drafting and Planning: Self-Assessment

From having looked at my class mate's comment on my 'Codes and Conventions' blog post: http://daniellepalmermedia.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/drafting-and-planning-codes-and.html
I found out that I'm going in the right direction, but I need to include the date and price onto the cover. But after having looked at his work, I saw many areas for improvement myself. He used quite a lot of smaller fonts and he tried to fill as much space as he could. This inspired me to not be afraid to use smaller fonts either in order to advertise the subtext of a cover-line. He varied the sizes of his fonts whereas I usually done the main cover line as the largest and then the secondary cover lines the same smaller font size. I could take inspiration from his adventurous font sizes but I'm glad how I used mainly bold, capitalized fonts to create a strong symbiosis between the cover star and magazine, and to obviously make the content stand out equally. I will take this feedback on board of what I'm doing right, what I'm doing wrong and endeavor to make my front covers as great as they can be!
But having done this task, I haven't just found out what I could've done better with the cover lines, but I analysed the pros and cons of the photos used (which I had no control over). Some of the photos were hard to work with, for example, the group photo for the 'M' magazine, the photo of 'Pitch' magazine and the 'Kings of Leon' image on SounD magazine. This helped me to understand what types of shots are best to work with for a magazine cover. I'd say mid-shots are the best to work with since you can get an equal distribution of cover star and room for masthead and cover lines etc.