Magazine analysis
The magazine i chose was this Kerrang cover, a typical magazine for the rock audience and a typical user of dark colours and unusual pictures. Like most magazine that have a large market it deploys use of most conventions, also because of its long existance the magazine has decades of experience in attracting the many millions of listeners of rock and all its subgenres. For instance the magazine has followed the most importand convention of only using 3 colours for the whole front cover, this is the 3 colour scheme rule. Furthermore to aviod too much confusion the magazine follows the 3 font rule. Other conventions are a title, strapline, slogan, smaller pictures and a bar code. Unfortunatly the case with almost all magazines is that some smaller less important conventions are broken to suit the reader, in this case the Kerrang magazine doesn't use a competition which could vastly improve its sales, also a date and price aren't displayed making the magazine seem elusive.
Classically the colours red and black are used in rock covers so to appeal to their audience Kerrang magazine used red for their sub headings and as a colour fill to stand out certain texts. they then used black for the title but unusually employed the use of white for all their text and yellow for some graphics. however this was used cleverly because of the main picture being mostly in black the white and yellow constasts it and stands out more. also over use of the colours red and black can make the cover confusing so by using more brighter colours the magazine is easily understandable.As stated before the subheadings, or coverlines, use the colours red and white this is used to appeal to the reader which therefore attracts them to reading and then investigate further. Also these coverlines are used to publicise the contents of the magazine, almost in a subliminal way, the main interest in the magazine is displayed on the front which should give the audience a reason to buy the magazine but to fully convince the audience to buy it the coverlines give more interesting tasters of whats inside.
Before choosing this particular cover of Kerrang i looked at previous covers to gain a better understanding of its previous audiences and how its developed its cover of the many years. by doing this i have determined that Kerrangs audience has only swayed slightly to heavier music like metal because of the bigger interest in metal that is now apparent and was lesser known years ago. But in terms of asethetic features of the magazine it has changed dramatically and stays very comfortable with using dark colours like black and red. This just shows Kerrang's atempts to stay modern and appeal to the newer audiences of rock which unfortunatly means regular readers of the magazine may find they grow out of its focused attempts to appeal to younger target markets.
Although Kerrang has a very focussed audience the magazine can be found in many different general stores like tesco and sainsbury's and mainstream book shops such as borders, but in the smaller unique stores Kerrang doesn't appeal. But the usual circulation of this magazine is music stores especially smaller music stores devoted entirely to the rock genre. It can be found in the larger supermarkets because of the many thousands that visit the stores and especially in border because of its main concentration on literature and magazines.
While doing this task i learned about the many layers of text and images that are used to show all the different conventions of magazines, also i learned about how important it is to follow the many conventions of magazines and that by breaking them the magazine can become confusing and unappealing. Also i learnt about researching my target audience before conducting the making of it to properly understand their likes and dislikes and find an appropriate colour and font scheme. But in terms of skills picked up i have a better undersdtanding of photoshop and its hundreds of options to help separate pictures and overall construct a suitable front cover.
