Magazine Cover Essay

Magazine Cover Analysis
SeventeenJoanna Humphreys

The use of photography, photo editing, cover lines, positioning, typefaces, colour, angle and ‘buzz’ words all work together to make a magazine cover into a finished product which will attract the eye of a reader and make the reader want to buy the magazine so they can open it up and find out more.

This essay is going to discuss how the house style of the magazine cover for ‘Seventeen’ is used to target a particular audience.

Looking at the magazine cover for ‘Seventeen’, it appears that the magazine is targeted at the audience of older teenage girls, possibly those in their last year of high school or those who are college students.

The masthead of the magazine cover is in an italic, feminine typeface and is quite large, which causes it to grab the attention of the reader straight away. The fact that it says ‘Seventeen’ is also a direct clue as to which target audience the magazine is aimed at.  Directly above the masthead there is a cover line which says ‘the #1 secret to falling in l♥ve’. This shows that although the magazine has an appearance of being for women, it is actually aimed at teenage girls as they will probably be more childish than older women, and will be able to relate more to this sort of cover line, whereas it would be too immature for an older woman to read.

The other cover lines are not all listed along the left side as is usually found with magazine covers, but rather are spread evenly along both sides of the magazine, which may be to make the cover stand out and look a bit different from the rest of the magazines on the shelf, which will cause the reader to be drawn to it more easily.

The model on the front cover is positioned in the centre of the page with direct eye contact, which causes the reader to feel like the picture is ‘looking’ at them and can also be a good way of making the reader be drawn to the magazine. The eye contact used could be described as ‘friendly’ eye contact as the model is smiling. This is a psychological trick used to grab readers’ attention.

The language used on the cover lines is informal and written in the sort of language that a teenage girl is likely to speak, for example the cover line ‘cute hairstyles’ is more likely to attract the attention of a teenage girl than that of an older woman, as an older woman would not be used to speaking in that type of language whereas a teenage girl would easily be able to relate to it.

The typefaces used on the cover lines are also quite feminine, some with slight curly edges and one in a ‘handwriting’ style font. This shows quite clearly that the magazine is targeted at females and also causes girls to be more attracted to it.

The magazine also encourages readers to buy it by putting small cover lines, which say things such as ‘Find Your Best Style Inside’ and ‘You Must Read This!’, shown in a circle which causes it to stand out from the other cover lines. This grabs the reader’s attention and then causes them to become interested in what they are going to read if they buy the magazine and causes them to feel like they will miss out if they don’t buy the magazine and read it. The use of ‘buzz’ words, such as ‘must’, also cause the reader to become even more interested.

Another technique used is changing the colour of certain words in order to make them stand out and grab the readers attention, for example where it says ‘the #1 secret to falling in l♥ve’, ‘l♥ve is in a contrasting colour to the rest of the cover line which causes it to be the first thing the reader looks at in that particular cover line.

It is interesting to note that the magazine does not have a selling line, maybe as the amount of cover lines and the way there are positioned on the magazine is a lot of information and a cover line may cause the cover to look too crowded.

Other small details such as using the number ‘526’ in the cover line ‘526 ways to look beautiful’ are used to interest the reader, as the number ‘526’ tends to look more interesting than the number ‘500’, for example.

From studying the front cover of this magazine I concluded that it uses feminine styles and colours, contrasting colours, and a female model to show that it is targeted at a female audience. In addition to this, it uses teenage language, shapes such as a ♥ and circles to emphasize certain cover lines to show that although feminine, the particular audience that the magazine is aimed at it that of teenage girls.