Magazine Cover Analysis 1

This is the cover for the tenth anniversary issue of Complex, a music and lifestyle magazine aimed at men.

There is only one colour on this cover in the masthead: white. White is quite a clean, pure colour, suggesting a slightly older target audience. However, the fonts used and the main item on the cover suggest a slightly younger audience.  A slight design flaw with the text is that it’s a bit difficult to read in the top-right corner, as both Bieber’s hand and the text are pale colours.

There is only one cover line on the whole cover which is quite small in contrast with the main image. In it, the words “Justin Bieber” are in bold, as he is the main focus for this cover, and it both attracts the eye more and makes it easier to read. The other two words, “Growing Pains”, are not in bold making them look slightly darker, as it looks more aesthetically pleasing underneath the “10” which has a similar effect. This splits the text into two halves, the text on the left which is the most important to the reader when skimming a magazine isle, and the text on the right, which is the extra information to read after you have picked it up off the shelf. This also may suggest two other things; why the text is so far up the page; and why there is no other text on the page: once you pick the magazine up from the shelf, the whole image is revealed. After that, with the limited information available on the cover, the initial reaction is to open up the mag to know why Bieber is beaten up and holding a slab of beef to his face. So the items within the image (the meat, blood, tuxedo etc.) add an air of mystery to the cover. This works in an opposite way to the Wire magazine cover that I chose. Where the eyes were attracted to the top third of that cover, on this one, the eyes are attracted to the bottom two thirds.

Another feature that is scarce on this cover besides text is the bar code. This may have been taken off for the purposes of the website, though, as it is the least important feature of the magazine when observing the cover online. You do not need to scan it, so you don’t need the barcode.

It could be argued that this cover has some ‘dead space’ like to the sides of Bieber’s face, but this magazine has clearly chosen to make its cover more artistic than informative. But the image, if it were zoomed out slightly, could be used on an informative cover, with text to the sides of Bieber’s head.

I think this magazine is aimed at a more sophisticated audience, but the image is of Justin Bieber, so this would suggest a younger audience. For these reasons, I think the target audience is 15 – 25 year olds. I lean closer to the 25 end of the scale because of the artistic feel of the cover, but several magazines today choose to be less informative on the cover, which is why I say 15. Because it’s a music and lifestyle magazine, and again because the image is of Bieber, I think the target audience would be mostly female, however, upon looking at the website, the target is clearly a mostly male audience. But I would argue that the cover suggests differently.