Magazine Front Cover Analysis

For my main task in my AS media work, I had to create a music magazine, including a front cover, contents page and feature article. Although, without any practise I wouldn't be able to create the front cover that I really wanted. Therefore, looking at other magazines as inspiration had to be my first logical step for my preliminary task of producing a front cover and contents page for a 'school magazine'. And with this idea I began analysing.

The first thing I did was to actually understand what the conventions were. Therefore, I researched many conventions, especially on websites such as Slide Share.

This website really helped me, especially since I did not know of conventions before I began researching them. Although they did not provide me with all the information I needed, it was definitely a starting point before I asked my teacher to give me good definitions of different conventions.

After doing a lot of research on the different conventions I needed to put them into practise. I began looking for front covers which would be my starting point for analysis. With these pictures I could see the layout of the magazine and the conventions that follow it. This would be great for my main task in the future and therefore I kept this in my folder for reference.

This was my first attempt at analysing a magazine. I chose a fashion magazine due to it being one of my favourite types of magazines, therefore I chose one of the most popular magazines ever made, Vogue and analysed it. Most conventions were followed and I spoke about this as seen in the picture above.

I then chose to analyse another magazine to make sure I knew of different conventions. Therefore I picked a music magazine (since my main task was to do a music magazine) and learned of some conventions. So, after analysing both magazines I was aware of what I needed to be included in my magazine.


With the front covers that I did, I also made GRANITE tables (genre, representation, audience, narrative, institutions, technology, evidence). This began giving me the connotations that I needed to make my own magazine successful. It discussed the various ways that my magazine should be suitable for my audience and how they have used particular conventions to show this. This is an extremely useful way to keep me informed of what to include and what not to do for my preliminary task.