Every magazine has a cover of some kind. It’s best to have an eye catching one to immediatly engage and interest the audience. There are several elements that go into a good magazine cover, such as the main cover star, masthead and the main cover line. These elements can have the same denotations, however their connotations can make them more appealing to their demographic. For example, the main cover line can help potentially unaware audience members understand the main cover star whilst also attracting the main cover stars fans to the magazine. The text of the main cover line can further add to the appeal of the magazine to its target demographic. To understand these different elements that go into a cover of a magazine, we annotated one ourselves to pinpoint some of these key features.
Here we’ve got a cover from MusicWeek featuring Dua Lipa as the main cover star. This cover is very interesting as it refuses many technical design conventions as it doesn’t contain any pug’s, plugs or insets. This helps the audience focus on the main attraction of this edition of the magazine, being Dua Lipa. This is further shown by how the main cover line is larger than the masthead, which also isn’t a very common thing to happen. In future I will think about these features when creating my own magazine cover to make it as eye catching and effective as possible for my target audience.