What I have learnt about magazine design? 20/01/2012
In todays lesson i have learnt many things about magazine design. There are many different sections to a magazine front cover that i have learnt the names of. There is a masthead, dateline, selling line, coverlines, left-third, barcode, main coverline, coverline, model credit and the main image. Each of these parts of the magazine front cover have to be carefully designed to interest the target market they are trying to reach.
In the lesson we looked at the magazine front cover above to be able to understand in detail the design of a magazine front cover. The mast head is the name of the magazine this is a visual branding of the magazine so it needs to be recognisable and unique. The dateline simply contains the month, year and price of the magazine. The selling line is the descriptio of the main marketing point, it could be something like "worlds best beauty magazine in the UK" or something like that. The coverlines which are generally placd in the left third are put there so that when they are in the shops and layered among others they will be seen and also people read from left to right so they will read these to see what stories are in the magazine. The main cover line is can take up to a quarter of the front cover, it is promoting the main story in the magazine so the font, size and colour of the text needs to be clear and noticeable over the main image so that it doesn't interfere. The main image that is on the front cover of the magazine has to have a relevance to the genre of the magazine so that it appeals the audience, also it has been researched and found out that people prefer photographs on magazines to have wide open pupils so typically faces are not centered on the nose but on an eye. Another thing i learnt was that in the UK the sales of the magazines in the shops the front cover is very important, and also that the photographs work much better over the illustrations. The colours that are usually avoided by editors are black, white and green as they do not stand out enough like red, but red can be over-used quite a lot on magazines
