Magazine Comparison Essay

1650 Words4 Pages

The design of a publication is what sells it to it’s audience. Gross (2015) said that “There are two important goals when designing a magazine cover; the first is to attract the potential buyer’s attention and the second is to express the content or theme of the magazine.” It all depends on the cover, the image, typography, overall design. So that is what I will be exploring in this essay. I have chosen to compare and analyse the free publications NME and Stylist. The two publications interested me because as they are both free, they do not need to promote their image in order to ‘sell’ their product. But instead purely base their design on how they want their publication to be portrayed in the public eye. These two magazine have separate …show more content…

NME tend to keep their recent covers fairly simple, often using plain backgrounds and either a full body or close up image of a celebrity on their cover, mostly musicians but quite often actors too. They pair this with their bright red, possibly white, bold branding at the top of the cover and a sub-heading simply stating the celebrity cover star’s name. This creates a very clean looking cover, which is attractive to the reader because they are not rushed around the cover jumping from busy headlines to the next. Stylist have a similar approach when it comes to their covers. The cover of Stylist tends to be filled with an image, often of celebrities or models but also with just images, such as food or places relevant to that edition (see figure six). These covers tend to have one heading on the page similar to NME, often stating a celebrity’s name or an article title that is within the magazine. The cover of Stylist tends to be relatively bright, often in pastel colours giving the whole publication a kitsch feel. The colour of the mast head also matches a colour within the image which as Bigman, A (2015) states, “In magazine cover design, common approaches are to either match or complement certain vivid areas of the photograph or illustration beneath,” is a common technique to making a cover look sleek and

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