magazine mock ups

These are two mock-ups of the magazines Q and kerrang which will help me better understand and utilise the codes and conventions of a magazine front cover. Starting with the Q, the typical conventions of a magazine are all present such as masthead, cover lines, central image bar code, price and so forth. What’s interesting about this cover is that nearly all of the text is in all capitals, except for the main cover line, which you would ordinarily expect to be all capitals. The whole page uses a very limited pallet of colours using only black white and red. In fact aside from the central image and one other small one in the top right corner, the cover is mostly text. One other notable part of the cover is that the central image partially overlaps the masthead, presumably because the ‘Q’ logo is already recognisable to its target audience and therefore doesn’t need to be shown in full.

In contrast to Q’s front cover which had very few images, kerrang’s cover is filled with images aside from the central one. While the main two colours used on this cover are white and purple, many more colours are utilised here than on Q’s cover. There is a lot less empty space in general on this cover as its filled with cover pictures and cover lines, however it also looks a little more cluttered than Q’s cover which may be because the two magazines are targeted to different audiences. Similar to Q, the masthead of kerrang is covered by the central image, again implying that the masthead doesn’t need to be fully shown because the target audience is already familiar with it. Finally, every single line of text shown on kerrang’s cover is in a bold capital sans serif font, which may be due to the magazines ‘in-your-face’ house style, also shown by the lack of unused space.