In the beginning of making my cover for the magazine. The big picture I am using has a bright white sky and bright green tree branches. To make font contrast from the picture I thought of making a white box that fades into the picture, and I can use dark gray or black font colors.
But after looking at covers for nature magazines online, I might try using no background box and dark brown font color to try to contrast the green and white of the picture. Or maybe I can lean into a more notebook-type style and use a hard-edge box with a box on the side to resemble a spine of sorts similar to the image below.
I am going to have to try many different things and see what works best. Maybe I will blog about it later in an update about how it went.