2. For my media coursework I am designing a front cover for a Music magazine along with a contents page & double page spread, but I am also redesigning the front cover and contents page for the school magazine. Publishing is a very competitive market and ensuring the front cover is perfect is an essential part for any magazine publishers, it is perhaps the most important part of any magazine. The cover attracts and gets the customers attention, because of this the graphic designers try and show the values of their magazine in a unique visual form that reflects the target audiences interest and what the magazine is about. The fonts, colours, images and style used, are signs & messages that establish the type of magazine that is being looked at.
3. The most important thing is the magazine logo design/masthead. Eye catching logos should reflect the image of the magazine and attract readers to the magazine cover. This is the magazine brand image. Traditionally the masthead is positioned at the top of the front cover so that the viewer’s attention is immediately drawn to it, a good logo should be original in its design but it should also remain simple and be clear enough so the reader finds it easy to read. This is important if magazines are stacked on the shelf or stand of a shop, so all the customer will see is the masthead that contains the logo, so it is important to get this appealing to their target audience because otherwise the customers will look at the masthead and just move on if it does not appeal to them. There are some simple conventions about the spacing and positioning of text and images when the layout of the cover is being arranged. One important convention that is frequently discarded is: less can be more. The text works best in columns – nearly always three columns, this is because it makes it easier to read, but filling to the edge of the page is avoided as this would make the design look cluttered and take the readers attention away from the image and to the words. The fonts that are used can help give the readers an impression of the style of the magazine. The general rule is to stick to one main font for the main bulk of the text. Though alternate fonts can be used for headers and different sub stories & section, it is best that this is keep to this to a minimum and avoid confusion. But also to make the articles easier to read they are split up into three columns, this is another convention of music magazines and magazines in general, and can be found in nearly every single magazine article.
4. After taking all of this on board I decided to deconstruct and analyse the covers of three lifestyle magazine (one of them, The rolling stone issue, is mainly a music magazine so will help me with the production of my music magazine) : Rolling Stone (October 1996 issue), Empire (January 2010 issue), and Men’s Fitness (September 2009 issue). I also deconstructed and analysed the autumn term issue of the Bodmin College magazine. Rolling Stone was founded in 1967 in San Francisco and was & still is published fortnightly. It was at first identified with and reported on the counter culture of that era, but is now very much more mainstream (a bit like a hippy from the sixties eventually coming round and working in an office, Rolling Stone has ‘grown up’ and taken its place in society). With its circulation of 1.4 million, it is currently the biggest and most influential selling culture journal/magazine in America. Historically, Rolling Stone’s cover image have been an index of the magazine priorities and view: The Grateful Dead and the San Francisco rock scene in the late Sixties; Vietnam and Watergate in the early Seventies; Springsteen and the Aids epidemic in the Eighties; Grunge, Gangsta Rap and Celebrity Culture in the Nineties, one of the example of the focus on Gangsta Rap is the context I am going to be looking at.
5. This issue of Rolling Stone feature the infamous Rap figure Tupac Shakur, striped to the waste, showing the prominent tattoos, with his bald, shaven head, breaking into the iconic image title of Rolling Stone. The image is in high contrast on a background with a colour fill along the same colours scheme, but several tones darker. The second largest font (2nd only to the title) reads the words Tupac Shakur, and is accompanied by text relating to this main article. There is a teaser about the 1996 election in America and above the title logo there is a teaser bar telling the reader about four other articles in this issue. The design of this particular Rolling Stone cover is laid out to give the main & only image (Tupac) total priority, this ensure that the read is left in no doubt that this issue is about Tupac. The close tonal range of the image and the background and the selection of the image give the cover a sombre, nearly sad feel, which is the back-story – the feature article is about one of the if not the most important and influential artists of the American Gangsta rap movement of the 1990’s and he has just died.
6. In reference to Rolling Stone’s title logo there are whole articles devoted to the development of this logo. The logo was first designed by Rick Griffin but was later designed by Jim Parkinson. It is iconic and important to the Rolling Stone brand that the titles logo has not changed since 1981, this would suggest that it is odd that the image of Tupac covers part of the title in this issue. Although this trick of the image breaking the title may seem unique, Rolling Stone employs this tactic quite often. I think this tactic does a lot of things for the magazine; it makes the feature article stand out, but it also re-enforces the brand. In this case the logo & title are such an iconic and strong image that the reader fills in the missing letters by themselves – the brand is so popular that people will buy it no matter what they will go straight for Rolling Stone, this also makes it hard for other magazines coming into this area and targeting this target audience, as they just cannot compete with Rolling Stone.
7. Empire was established in July 1989, it is a British film magazine that is published monthly. It has a circulation of about 190,000 and is subsequently the biggest selling film magazine in Britain, and completely outsells its biggest rival Total Film.Empire concentrates, covers and reviews mainstream films and art films, but it generally concentrate on mainstream films. The January 2010 issue I have chosen feature a very important logo. The logo is normally in red, but this title use electric blue/white, cartoon imagery with the use of electricity and lightening going around the whole title and top of the cover. Again as with Rolling Stone the title logo is broken by the main image of Iron Man (another prominent, strong male figure) and the text in the teaser bar at the top is split into four sections.
8. Men’s Fitness is a men’s lifestyle magazine that was founded in 1987 in the USA, it was originally called Sports Fitness, but changed its name to Men’s Fitness in 1988. The magazine’s target audience is men ages 21-40 and feature in-depth articles on nutrition, fitness and sports, but also contains smaller articles, on things like sex tips, fashion, recipes & surveys (a bit like a male version of Sugar). Men’s Fitness currently has a circulation of about 700,000, a long way off best selling Men’s Health. With Men’s Fitness the important, anchoring logo convention is once again broken, and unlike in Men’s Health the images on the cover are frequently in colour, text is normally kept to just once side, there is a use of a lot of different colours and font sizes, altogether it is a much busier cover than Rolling Stone & Empire. The front covers of both Men’s Fitness & Men’s Health shout out ‘macho man’, muscle bodies and strong men, but there are also hidden connotations of campness. The editors of both magazines have said they do not publish soft porn, but the rest of the industry claims they are in denial. This issue is also similar to the other two magazine I have deconstructed as it also has a prominent & strong male figure, this time it being Larry Fitzgerald – the very popular, famous and great American football player, so he alone would bring and addition of readers that would not normally read the magazine but may be a fan of him and think to read the magazine because of him being on the front cover & the main article being about him & his training regime.
9. With the college magazine I found it a bit disappointing as when I analysed it I found that the only images on the front cover where those of the dance platform that had recently taken place, which already starts to limit their target audience, and then it also has mainly dark, dull colours, nothing to make the magazine stand out. After a while of analysing this magazine I realised why it is like this, and that is because it is targeted at the parent/guardians of the student the college are handing it out to.
