Analysis of Front Cover and Contents page

(one of the magazines I based mine on)

 I drew inspiration from other magazines specialising in the same/ similar genre as mine like 'XXL' magazine who specialise in only Hip-Hop and 'Rap-Up' which is a Hip-Hop and RnB magazine.
This allowed me to see the different forms and conventions that I would need to use on a magazine which specialises In Hip-Hop, as well as implementing features you would normally see in any magazine like a bar code for example.

I noticed from 'XXL' issue that the masthead was very visible so I decided to use this idea into mine as the masthead is the brand image and the main source of your brands own individual identity, but even with this the main image in XXL magazine seemed to dominate most of the magazine which, I also implemented into my magazine noticing that the main feature of that months magazine should be the thing you look to show most in my magazine. I also liked the idea of putting subtitles up to show the other things that are going to be featured in the magazine because I felt it helps provide much detail and information to your target audience and the use of a simple colour scheme in XXL magazine was also something else I adopted because I think it showed a sense of formality and it keeps with the colour scheme of the masthead empathising the brands individual identity.

I decided to use a

The Front cover of my magazine includes:

• A masthead
• Bar code
• Headline
• Subtitles
• Advertisement
• Price of magazine
• Date of Issue
• Strap line
• A pull
• A Image



(What I based my contents page on)



Although NME's genre of magazine is rock and mine is Hip-Hop I still chose to use elements from NME's contents page to create my own, I liked NME's contents page because I felt that it provided a lot of detail on what was going to happen in the current issue and was really organised and had really nice layout. The things that NME did on their contents page that I chose to use on mine was to put the main feature of the magazine in the middle of the contents page provided with a image of the artists, page number and what the feature was about, this would not only catch people's attention but is also a good way to provide more information on the main feature.

I also chose to put the other features of my magazine under different subtitles and put them on the right hand side of my magazine provided with page numbers and details on what was happening in each section, this provided much more detail on the other sections of my magazine and is a good way to organise the contents page rather than having it in a mess which would make it much harder for people to understand.

And also instead of amateur writing up 'contents page' in my contents page I instead writ 'this week in light up magazine' to make it sound more professional. 

The contents page of the magazine include:

• A masthead
• subtitles
• page numbers
• link to twitter
• two images of different artists
• yellow and black colour scheme (linking to masthead)

How I made my front cover