Magazine Cover Review

 This week in class, we studied an array of different magazines that were published by different publications. We were able to analyze each magazine and determine the audience of each magazine. Out of all of the magazines we studied, my personal favorites and the magazines I will discuss in this post are The Cosmopolitan, GQ, Better Homes and Gardens, The Rolling Stone, and Vogue. I chose these magazines because not only do I believe they were the most interesting, these magazines are also incredibly well known so I can also evaluate the trends in these magazines with the help of my own personal knowledge of them in the past.     

    The magazine The Cosmopolitan is a staple magazine for young women and has been for years. The Cosmopolitan has made the image of its brand very specific like many other magazines. Unlike other magazines however, The Cosmopolitan’s brand has been founded on feeding off of the insecurities of young women. It profits off of the insecurities in young women that it helps create and nurture with covers full of stereotypically attractive and skinny women which attracts women who want to appear more like said models. This magazine shows impressionable young women that they need to appear a certain way to be accepted in the world, but if you do not already look that way, buying their magazine will give them a million little tips and tricks on how to change themselves. This magazine is also known for always having the word sex at the very least once somewhere on their front cover. The text in The Cosmopolitan is made of feminine and sexy colors, which also attract women to read. 

The magazine GQ is also a staple magazine, but this time instead of being directed towards women, it is directed towards rich men. The cover of this magazine tends to be famous attractive men in some form of suit or expensive apparel but is known to sometimes feature an attractive popular woman instead. The text on the front page of every magazine tends to look nearly identical, with aligned text and masculine colors, which shows yet again that the target audience is mainly men. Every single thing about this magazine screams rich and masculine, with ads that cater to upper-class men. 

The magazine Better Homes and Gardens is a typical magazine you would find on a friend’s mother’s living room table. This is because this magazine is marketed to mainly mothers. The cover of the magazine is always very feminine and cute, usually featuring flowers, décor, or a well put together woman who is wearing a large smile? The articles typically feature fun seasonal activities for mothers to do around the house or decorating advice. 

The Rolling Stone magazine is the most different magazine that we studied. Instead of being a fashion or wellbeing-based magazine, it is focused on all thing's music. The cover usually has some form of upper body shot of either an up-and-coming artist, or an already well-known artist. The magazine caters to music lovers instead of specifically one gender. The front page of the magazine shows that its contents are usually about the feature artist and a list of hits that relate to them. 

My personal favorite out of all of the magazines that we studied was Vogue. Vogue in not only incredibly aesthetically pleasing, which is a very important factor for me. Not only the way the models are dressed and positioned in this magazine are beautiful, but also the way they structure text and pictures together is eye-catching. The magazine is targeted for high-class fashionable women. Similar to GQ, the ads in this magazine are of expensive designer brand items. The reason why the formatting of Vogue is so eye-catching is described in an article by Michael Scherer. 

The name of the article I will be discussing is “Chances are you won't bother to read 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?)”, by Michael Scherer. The article states, “Editors have been forced to design their magazines for an indifferent reader”. This is something I will have to take into consideration when I design my magazine, because the last thing a creator of a magazine would want is to bore their readers. The article also goes on to discuss that you can go about doing this by either decreasing article length but increasing the overall number of articles. This is helpful for a brand who often publishes magazines that is in need of attracting new readers. However, this may not be of much use to me due to the text requirement and page limits for the project. 

Overall, my decision to create a magazine for my project still stands. This is because even though I now see how it may be difficult to create a clear image for my brand and to keep the same general flow throughout my magazine, I just want to create one even more. I want to be able to create a magazine that is different from the norm, while still being properly structured. I want to create something that touches on either taboo subjects, or subjects that are not entirely mainstream. 

A few examples of magazine designs that I can use as inspiration are published by Indie Magazine: