NOTEmusic
Front cover Examples
As I chose to do an 'indie', 'grunge' style magazine, I needed to look at different magazine covers to give me inspiration of the alternative looks. There are a few examples to the right side. These are the covers that stood out to me the most for various reasons. I will take a feature from each magazine to create my own for the final product. When first starting the magazine, I knew I wanted to have a simple cover which all of the front covers on the side have. When I started to research into magazine covers more, I liked the look of the celebrity or model on the cover, to be standing in front of the title.
Once I found the NME magazine cover, I liked how this magazine set out the text along with the image on the front cover. The text was visible as they altered it to fit around the singer which could attract the audience's view elsewhere. As well as the text standing out, as her hair is the only colour on the page, it becomes more vibrant to the audience. The hair is prominent compared to the rest of the text on the image. Also, the text size varies depending on what is being said. The magazine name is the largest piece of text on their which allows the audience to generally be attracted to that first. The rest of the text varies as it all depends on how important it is. The name of the celebrity on the front is also considerably larger than the rest as that information will be important to whoever reads the magazine. By doing this, the company are able to use colour and size of the text to attract people to specific area more than others. If someone is attracted to the large bit of text in the first place, they are more likely to want to carry on reading whatever is said, so they go closer to the magazine to read it. On my magazine, I want to use a similar approach which consists of white or maybe black text with a slight use of colour. I may use the models lips on my magazine to be in colour like NME had done, but in their case they used her hair to be vibrant.
This magazine front cover may be my favourite one out of the four I found. I like many features about it, a few being the layout, colour scheme, the placement of text in specific areas and many more. Billboard is one of the most famous music magazines of all time, which is inevitable with their style and content. One of the main reasons that this stood out to me is the way Billboard present their magazine. They make it look simple by not over-crowding the page, but have enough on their to inform viewers about what is inside. A lot of the text is placed so that it fits around the celebrity, yet not all of it is in this case. Some of the text at the right hand side fits around her, yet the title doesn't. This is unusual for a magazine, which the title isn't bold and clear to read. It adds a twist onto what magazines typically look like. However, I like that they have done this as it gives the look that the celebrity or model on the front cover is the main article of the magazine. I will use this on my magazine as I like how it looks as if they model is actually in front of the said name. Although, I want the title of my magazine to be more visible so I may have the celebrity further down so more of the text is able to show through.
Before I needed to research into various music magazines, I hadn't heard much of Heroine Magazine. It wasn't as well known as the other three examples I have, although I like it just as much. The black and white house style stood out to me in particular for this magazine. It gives the magazine a darker vibe than it would in colour. You can see the large text clearly which makes it a Kicker as the audience gets attracted to the main content. The text size also varies depending on the importance of it. Similar to the other chosen magazines, the title of the magazine tends to be the largest size which yet again, attracts the audience towards that area. I also think that having it in black and white makes it prominent as you don't usually see that. Linking the text and image together, everything is still monochrome. The white text is placed so that you can still read what it says, yet it isn't far off the colour scheme. For my magazine, I do want my image to be primarily monochrome as it fits the 'indie' image I am looking for. I may use colour slightly to define things, but other than that, monochrome.
Unlike the other magazines, Heroine doesn't have many front covers. There is a very limited amount which gives this magazine a disadvantage.
On the final front cover page example, I chose to use the music magazine Kerrang! This magazine is very well known for its more punk rock genre of music, yet I still wanted to use it for my inspiration. Similar to Billboard magazine, Kerrang had the celebrities almost as if they were in front of the title. Even though on this cover there isn't as much text as they usually use, there is still enough for me to be able to use it. It gives the impression that they are literally in front of the title. Kerrang! also uses slight colour on top of typically dark images. By doing this, there is just a right balance between the two. It isn't too dark that it doesn't look good, and there isn't too much colour for it to look abnormal for this type of magazine. As I have stated previously, I want to use this type of approach for my magazine. I don't want there to be too much colour as indie magazines don't typically use a lot of vibrant colours. I also want to use the same idea of having the celebrities, or model in my case, in front of the masthead. I like the look of it and it will give my magazine a more unique design.
