Joshua Scott AS Media
A R T I C L E R E S E A R C H
I wanted to find out what I needed to put on the cover of magazine to make it appear more attractive to my potential audience. My main objected was to discover the type of information magazines have on their cover as I was a little confused as to what I’d display to my audience. I researched into magazines such as Paper, Mixmag and NME as they all feature a similar style to the one I’d like to achieve.
Paper magazine tends to keep its cover very minimal to avoid it looking overcrowded or cluttered. I quite like this look as it draws the eye to the centre of the page to where the main photo is. The main photo is usually of an artist in a distinctive pose or with a trademark look such as Nicki Minaj with her iconic colourful hair, Vanessa Hudgens with her ‘rebel’ or ‘good girl gone bad’ look which sparks an immediate interest from the audience as it contrasts her squeaky clean reputation, or Azealia Banks with her overtly sexual pose which links well with her often controversial choice of song lyrics.
You can see with Paper that each of the text boxes is outlined with a fine black line or has a highlight to make that particular box the most prominent on the page. While the text is nearly all the same font you can see that it changes sizes and colour to highlight key information in each of the small text boxes. You can also see a heavy focus on major names on each of the covers. This helps the magazine seems significant with the audience as they will always look for big names within music and when they see them on a cover they’ll instantly be drawn to them.
Mixmag sticks to electronic music convention with very bright colours and high density information to draw attention to the magazine. Each issue features a CD which takes up a large portion of the cover. This helps give the magazine extra appeal to the audience as they’d feel they’re getting even more for their money when they buy the magazine. You can see on each issue the title stays nearly the same with the colour being the only thing that changes. This keeps a strong brand identity and makes the magazine very recognisable. Also each issue features one large central article to draw your attention and then many smaller articles on either edge of the cover. This fills up the page and offers a lot of detail to the audience which further increases the value for money of the magazine.
You can see that Mixmag also has a large focus on celebrity names on their covers. However, the names of artists are usually listed down the sides of the cover rather than in the middle. You can see on the top two issues that the main area of focus is either on a news item or on a pull quote. This males the magazine a lot more exciting to the audience as it gives them a sample of what’s inside and encourages them to buy the magazine to learn more. All of the articles listed down the side of the cover are displayed in alternating colours to separate them out and keep them easy to read. Interestingly they’re all in the same size font which suggests that no item is more important than the next and also helps to keep the focus on the main news item on the cover. They mainly feature either a name or a short phrase such as ‘’produce your own tunes’’. The short phrases mean that there can be a lot more information on the cover which will inevitably encourage more people to buy it.