Magazine Front Cover AnalysisBy Ashleigh Darlington

Key Features: recognise

Masthead

Selling Line

Main Image

Main Cover Line

Left third

Bar code

Cover lines

Cover Lines

In partnership with NSPCC

Title Of Magazine:Recognise is quite new to the magazine market as it came out in 2011. It is published every two months, where it presents an electric mix of music fashion and sport which is for both men and women ages 20-30, this explains why the only colours used are grey and white and just one image with more text, as it is for a more older audience that would prefer to read and find out things rather than just look at pictures like a younger audience would so there has only been one used where in this case it has been used as the background image, filling up the entire cover with text then put on top of it.

Masthead and Selling Line:

The masthead is the visual branding of the title and is often done in a specially designed typeface to be very recognisable and unique and the masthead is usually used on the contents page inside as well as the front cover, and as a logo for advertising and branding purposes. The selling line for this magazine is “ A socially aware lifestyle magazine for men and women” this selling line is very straight forward as it is just explaining what type of magazine it is, the selling line is used to attract their audience so that they know the magazine is for them. So in this magazines selling line it actually states there target audience which is men and women.

Main Image

The main image, also used as the background image is of Paloma Faith a 27 year old British singer, songwriter and actress who comes under the genre soft rock, which is the genre of the magazine when it is a music issue and as it is a British magazine that has the target audience of men and women aged 20-30 and she is a British woman aged 27 she fits perfectly for the main image and feature for the magazine and really helps to attract the target audience.

Key Features: NME

Cover Lines

Masthead

Dateline

Barcode

Main Cover Line

Main Image (background image)

Left Third

Title Of Magazine:This magazine has been being published every week since March 1952, it is dedicated to indie/rock music, it is edited by Mike Williams and it is run by the IPC Media Company. It’s target audience is 16-19 year olds, as you can tell by the colors and font that they have used as they have used big bold texts and bright colors: red and pink for the things that they want to stand out the most such as the masthead and the cover line and the names of the bands that feature in the magazine. Also they have only used one image that they have made the background the fact that they have only used one image is due to there target audience being older teenagers rather than younger so that there is not lots going on and as they are older they would rather read than look at images, which is why there’s more text that images.

Masthead and Selling Line: The masthead is the visual branding of the title and is often done in a specially designed typeface to be very recognisable and unique and the masthead is usually used on the contents page inside as well as the front cover, and as a logo for advertising and branding purposes. Everything that they want to stand out on this magazine such as the masthead they have made the font a lot bigger and in bright colours, as nearly every other piece of writing is in white but that which is bright red to ensure that it stands out amongst everything else.

Main ImageThe main image has also been used for the background is of an American band called Paramore an alternative rock band that’s target audience I would say is teenagers, which is the same target audience as the magazine itself, which is why they have chose this band to go on the front as it fits in with there genre and there target audience. The image shows all the band with the lead singer stood at the very front, ensuring that she stands out the most and each member of he band are shown and all of them are looking directly at the camera so that they are giving their audience eye contact helping to involve them more which will draw them in.

The two magazines I chose to compare are Recognise and NME, they are bot different types of rock music magazines recognise is soft rock where as NME is indie/alternative rock music. A thing that both covers have in common is that they both only use one image which they have also used for the background. For the

masthead, Recognise have there masthead going from the top left corner across to the top right corner. Recognise is for an older audience where NME is for a younger audience, we can tell this by the type of colours they have used as NME use more bright colours such as the red that they have used for the masthead and the pink that they have used for the band that is on the front cover of the magazine and Recognise just use white for all the text. Although there is only one image used on each of the magazines, there still looks as though there is more stuff going on in NME magazine, because they have a younger audience, as they want to make it look as if they’re getting more because that’s what they want.