Magazine Cover Review

     My initial impression whenever I would read a magazine is completely different to how I read a magazine now. When I would read a magazine before I knew how to analyze one, I wouldn’t even read it. I would never just read magazines, I would only ever pick one up if I was in a waiting room somewhere and there happened to be one so I would flip through and barely read any of the articles and just flipped through the pictures. Although now that I’ve learned how to analyze a magazine and search for details, I now know that there are so many subtle hints that tie the magazine and the topics they’re discussing together. For example, the “Rolling Stones” magazine gives us this message of “Lil Baby’s Uprising” by angling the picture making a play on words and grabbing the reader's attention. 

The next discovery I made when taking a better look and analyzed the magazines was the impact of the cover image and feature article. For example, the “Better Homes & Gardens” and the “Food & Wine” magazines have a very simple black background with one type of object on the front cover. The “Better Homes & Gardens” magazine has decorative pumpkins with the initiative to get everyone excited about Halloween and the “Food & Wine” magazine has a picture of one food item to get the reader to continue reading to find that single recipe and in the hopes the reader will stumble upon a few other recipes. Source 2 states, “Conventional wisdom has it that readers are losing patience with long magazine stories”. This states that the cover of the magazine sets up the rest of the magazine because first they need an eye catching cover to get the reader to potentially pick it up and then keep their attention long enough to actually flip through the whole magazine, or at the very least skim through it. 

In addition to my last discovery, I made some revelations when looking into the smaller aspects of the magazine. And that is the way these magazines brand themselves, keep the same audiences, and secure advertise dollars. The best example for this would be “Cosmopolitan” and “Vogue”, and this is because these magazines, especially Vogue are very well known and already have a name for themselves and secure advertise dollars just by featuring expensive name brands like Chanel, Dior, etc. Source 2 also states, “Magazine consumers may still have a great appetite for reading, and more time than is generally realized, but they also have far more choices”. And Cosmopolitans initiative is to have the freshest faces of new celebrities and it keeps the audience coming back so they can keep up to date with the newest faces and to learn more about them. 

This blog post made a major impact on my decision when it came to how I want to do my portfolio project. I had a feeling after reviewing the magazines I would possibly want to shift my mindset more towards doing the film, but I was wrong. In fact, after going over all these magazines I’m even more persuaded to choose the magazine over the film. The idea of being able to speak my mind on a certain topic/subject made me excited, for a project! At first when I read the basic idea of this project, I was nervous because I could tell it was going to take a lot of time and be a lot of hard work. But after looking into it and taking out the idea of doing the film option the thought of doing this project didn’t seem so bad.