Magazine Cover Review

             This week, instead of studying movie openings, I was given the task of observing magazines from the cover, to the advertisements, to the contents page, and finally the feature article. Much like the movie openings last week, magazines take a lot of artistic and stylistic choices to string together. With that being said, while observing the pieces, I had to keep in mind the reasoning for certain fonts, font color, certain word choices, coloring or filters on photos, backgrounds on photos, and many other elements that go into magazine designing. Some other key elements that I had to keep in mind was “What is the targeted audience?” or “What message are they trying to convey?” In the following text, I will be analyzing my answers to these questions. 

 

            To begin with, the “Rolling Stones” magazine. Right off the bat, you see “Lil Baby” on the cover. Lil baby is a very popular rapper and almost everyone has heard his name. Using someone influential like this can develop the interest of new audiences. As you look deeper into the cover, the subtitle reads “Lil Baby’s Uprising” obviously referring to the artists up and coming popularity and fame. To coincide with the subtitle, the cover photo shows the artist standing on top of what looks a ledge, having the point of view of the camera face up at him. I thought this was clever because everything goes together from the subtitle, to the artist, and the cover photo. Another thing I noticed, was the background of the cover photo. Behind him you see graffiti and poorly built houses indicating that he may not be in the best of neighborhoods. Using my prior knowledge, I know that this artist, before rising to fame, he lived with his single mother and two sister’s barley making ends meet. With me knowing this information, this shows me that his feature article might be about how he got out of the “hood” or “projects” and rose to fame.  I thought that it was very cool how the designers of this magazine decided to tie everything together. 

 

            Secondly, while studying these magazines, we made sure to dive into magazines tailored to men and women separately. One of the men’s magazine “GQ Magazine” shows Travis Scott on the cover. Much like “Lil Baby” he is very influential in the music industry which could bring more readers to this magazine. This magazine is usually more fashion, style, and sex based when it comes to content, so using a music artist would bring different people into reading. With Travis Scotts nickname being “La Flame”, they use a fire or flame like, font throughout the cover and his feature article. This also is a key element in magazine designing because everything is going together. When you dive into the advertisements, you see very expensive brands like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada, and many more. With this you can clearly see that this magazine is usually tailored to more wealthy, stylish people. Similarly, to the men’s magazine, “Vouge” women’s magazine is mostly directed to more wealthy, stylish people with many expensive brand advertisements, and fashion photography throughout the magazine. Using certain brand advertisements is cultivating brand loyalty which is usually a tactic that magazines use to target a certain audience. 

 

            Next, whist there were many similarities between men’s and women’s magazine, there are also significant differences. To be more specific, the women’s magazine “Better Homes & Gardens” is more tailored to people with time, maybe people with kids or retired people. This magazine shows crafts and festive decorations that people could possibly recreate. However, the men’s magazine “Sports Illustrated” shows many photos of women in bathing suits or men with their shirts removed. They are capitalizing on sex because sex sells in the industry. Although women’s magazines do this to, women’s magazines have a broader spectrum of magazines from crafty, fashion, and sexy magazines. 

 

            Finally, the short attention span syndrome is finally catching up to this generation almost making long magazine journalism obsolete replacing it with small bite size articles. According to author Michael Scherer of “Chances are you won’t be reading this article. It is just one long block of text, after all, unbroken by alluring pictures, snappy captions, or eye-grabbing infographics. You can’t click it. You can’t flip it. All you can do is read it. (Does Size Matter?). With reading this article and studying variety of magazines, I am positive that I would like to do a magazine. I feel like I will be most creative and fluid doing so.