Conventions of a Magazine

Conventions of a Magazine

·         Master Head - this is the magazines name and also an important part of branding.

·         Slogan - this is a ‘catch phrase’, summing up the newspapers unique selling pint.

·         Puffs and Blurbs - these are the colour bands that aim to attract readers to stories inside the newspaper or the ‘coming soon’ features.

·         Headlines - this would be the largest typeface on the front cover, showing that it is the main statement.

·         Sub-heads - are the small typeface, sometimes italicised, explaining more of the story.

·         Lead story - highlighted as being of most interesting for readers

·         By-line - journalists name and details, such as the date and time it was published.

·         Secondary Lead - still an important story but not as important as the Lead story.

·         Photographs - illustrate the lead story.

·         Menu - columns of the information showing what each section of the magazine is about and where to find things inside.

·         Small/line ad - contains text only, no images.

·         Display ad - includes pictures.

·         Exclusive - this means that the newspaper and no one else was able to cover this story, therefore it can’t be used by any other magazine or newspaper. The paper will pay their source which reassures them that it would not be used by anyone else.

 

There are many conventions that both magazine covers and content pages have in common. The main reason for this is to make the reader believe and understand the magazines high standards and make it look more professional.

Some of the conventions who be pictures, both pages would usually have pictures on them to illustrate the information as well as attract the readers to keep no reading. Another would be the typography use: the selection of typefaces and the arrangement of them can be as important as the use of color or images. Research has proven how good typography affects a reader’s mood, and also allows some to know what magazine they are reading just by looking at the typography of the cover page’s master head.

Moreover, creative use of colours also allows the magazine look more professional as well as delivers the right message in a right way. Depending on the colour scheme of the cover page, will immediately show the magazines target market. For example, a brightly coloured magazine would usually be for a younger audience such as children, whereas a simple coloured cover page with more information on the front would be for mainly adults.

From previous research, I was able to find out that most magazines consist of the conventions above. This helps to make more of their magazines to be bought by their customers as well as making their target market perfectly clear. Both cover and content pages always have pictures with colours, the basic point for this is to illustrate the magazines purpose moreover, give the readers an idea of what’ll be inside. Another convention that the cover pages use that content pages don’t would be a by-line. This is to show who wrote the article in the magazine as well some of their details. The reason that content pages don’t use this would be because it would go against the very purpose of a contents page, which is to show and navigate the readers to the page of their most interest.