When creating a magazine cover, understanding and appealing to your audience demographics and psychographics is extremely important. Producers and creators use audience segmentation in order to find their target audience, and create media based off of this. It can be split into an ideal age, gender or class that they want their media to appeal to.

The technical design conventions on a magazine can be manipulated to connote to a certain feeling or idea . For example, although the Rolling Stone is usually a magazine about music for older males, the topless image of Harry Styles could infer sex appeal, which could then cause the target audience to change to younger females. However the other cover lines and topics in the magazine can bring back interest from an older, more intellectual audience. The contrast between the sex and psychedelics to politics can work well to encourage a range of audiences.

Besides the image, the font and colours can also effect your target audience. For example a bright and colourful magazine cover may imply its made for a younger audience, whereas a more mellow and softer coloured cover can appeal more to older readers. The same goes with masthead and cover lines fonts.

When creating my own music magazine I will put research into my audience segmentation, in order to guarantee my technical design conventions convey the right idea to appeal to my target audience. I must be careful to manipulate the features of my magazine cover to imply what I want to my audience.