Magazine Style FileMAGAZINE FRONT COVER

Layout: This magazine is SFX. This magazine is about science fiction, and on the front it is advertising Doctor Who, which is a sci-fi drama. This magazine therefore has a similarity to the genre of the film I will be advertising in my magazine cover, Dilemma, which is a drama/fantasy.

This layout interests me. There is quite a lot of text on this magazine cover, and they seem to have balanced the blue and darker colours of the anchorage, with a white and yellow series of text across the cover. This contrasts and complements the anchorage, and helps it stand out. I like the layout of the thumbnail images. I like the way it clearly features the films it will be talking about, and it has left space for quite a bit of text on the cover.

I am not too sure about the amount of text on the cover. It does look rather cluttered in my opinion. It could be cleaner. However, I think that the main anchorage of the Doctor does sort of compensate for this. This is the part of the cover free from text, and he takes up quite a large amount of it, so it balances with the text. Also, again, the contrast between the lack of text in the centre makes him more dramatic, since a composition technique I learnt whilst making the film poster is that composing a main element in the centre of an image makes it more dramatic.

The main cover line isn’t really that large, and the masthead takes up a lot of the cover. There is quite a balance between all of the text then really, but you can tell that the text saying ‘Doctor Who’ is directly connected to main anchorage still, because the text is directly touching the main anchorage too.

It is a cluttered cover I think, but it does a good job of being quite a conventional magazine cover.

Colour: I like the colour scheme included in this cover. The two shades of blue work well together. It almost gives the cover a colour theme of its own. The different shades of the same colour make it stand out. The stars and blue space gas in the masthead make it appropriate to the film, so the masthead works well with the main anchorage. This colour scheme is used with all of the text on the cover, along with some black also. The main cover line featuring the title of the film also works well together.

Overall, this does not overpower the rest of the cover, because the rest of the cover is white, so the colours don’t particularly clash. There is a strip of red on the page also, however this is small. Some of the main cover line does overlap onto this red, so it can be seen slightly how these colours would clash. It would make the cover stand out, but not appropriately. It would make the cover look ugly, and not necessarily adding to the success of the magazine sales. The use of colour is also somewhat balanced nicely by the layout of the front cover.

All of the cooler blues and blacks on the left of the cover are balanced by the warmer colours of the skin of the astronaut, and the white of his suit. The white background also helps to balance the colours of the larger pieces of text, like the masthead and the main cover line. I think that this makes the front cover look, overall, more aesthetically pleasing. This could relate to Levi-Strauss’s theory of Binary Oppositions. The cold colours matched with warm colours, and the black matched with white. Binary opposites can be used to help develop a narrative and push it along, which could be argued as giving a production some more depth. Perhaps the use of these binary oppositions of colour could show some more depth to the image.

Opposite colours that complement each other are used in films all of the time, so there is some evidence to base this from. It has been seen that certain films do show strong tones of teal/orange in their colour scheme. These two colours are opposite, with shades of orange relating to the skin colour of characters, and the teal relating to the background. A good example of this is perhaps Terminator Genisys. This sort of colour scheme has been seen.

However, the blue/black does somewhat overpower the white and skin colours, which could reflect more on the tone of the film. The front cover has been given some more depth, but it still reflect the cold, dark, and space related tones and themes of the film Interstellar. Perhaps this technique of using opposite colour and colours that complement each other well makes the front cover more eye-catching (because the opposite colours contrast, and the contrast is noticeable), pleasing and effective at persuading the reader to buy the magazine. This could be technique to think about when planning the colours that I will use for my magazine front cover.

Tag line/selling line: This line promotes the magazine using a play on words that promotes the film also. The use of the term “mind-blowing” related to the psychologically challenging nature of the film. This allows the magazine to promote themselves further and it allows the audience to perhaps find out more about the film, by referencing its themes and narrative. This is an interesting technique that perhaps I could adopt.

Masthead: The masthead for this issue has also been stylized in the format of building that resembles those from the film. In my opinion, this makes the masthead for the magazine look more interesting and cool. This stylizing again also helps to promote the film. This masthead allows the audience to get a better idea of the tone of the film, so the customers can perhaps be more informed by the film. This could a good technique to adopt, but I think there is also some importance in establishing the brand of the magazine too.

This can be supported by the colour of the cover lines. The grey/silver colour scheme of the masthead/cover lines works well.

In addition to this, relating to the other covers I have looked at, there is an opposition in colour schemes to be seen. The very cool blues, greys and silvers are contrasted with other small elements in red, which partially balance the main colour scheme. The red also stands out because of this, so the magazine cover looks more appealing, eye-catching and aesthetically pleasing to the customer.