Magazine Cover Review

I am not the kind of person who usually reads magazines, seeing as I get most of my news from online, so when we were reviewing all these magazines in class, I realized how much detail and thought really goes into the cover page, and the content page. For example, when talking about brand loyalty, the “Oprah” magazine we were reviewing, shows how she has made her entire brand built around joy and happiness. This becomes evident in the lettering she puts the biggest on the cover, along with the articles she writes about inside the magazine. People buy this magazine to find ways to “live their best life”, and find happiness in dark times, and she stays true to that by emphasizing words such as "joy" on the front cover, along with writing articles about how to "find the joy in mourning". 

 The impact of the cover image is also extreme. It is the first thing people see and often what determines whether or not they buy the magazine. It can be used to make a political statement or draw the reader in with its extreme graphics. For example, both “Sports Illustrated” and “Men’s Health” had attention grabbing cover photos, to get the focus of their marketed readers.  It is very important to make a statement with the cover photo because as stated in the article “Chances are you won't bother to read this article. It is just one long block of text, after all, unbroken by alluring pictures, snappy captions, or eye-grabbing infographics. You can't click it. You can't flip it. All you can do is read it. (Does Size Matter?)” they state how “It is absolutely critical these days to reach out and grab the reader”, with young readers having “less attention span, and less interest in anything that is intellectually challenging”, the cover photo may be the only hope for the magazine to interest its young readers. “GQ” did a great job of marketing to their younger readers with a picture of one of the world’s most popular rappers right now. They knew that this would grab the attention of the young readers, and then proceeded to put their political stances on the front along with Travis Scott. This is their attempt at influencing their impressionable readers and it was extremely well done. 

This lower attention span may help the magazine in one way and that is grabbing ad dollars. It allows the company to put in flashy ads for their product in hopes the reader pays more attention to that rather than the articles in the magazine itself. This was prevalent in magazines such as “Vouge”, where the first 4-5 pages were ads to companies which are mainly marketed to wealthy readers. In this day and age, photos are the main way magazines cultivate their aesthetics to their readers, rarely is it passed through the topic they talk about in their articles, but in the phots that go along with these articles. As far as choosing designing a magazine for my project, I am leaning more towards doing the movie, just for the sole reason that I feel I will have better success with my own creativity, and, I have more interest in that realm rather than designing my own magazine cover and content page, but I can’t wait to see what everyone else comes up with.

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