Functions of a front cover, contents page and DPS

The function of a magazine front cover is to advertise the magazine by making the image and layout interesting and use titles that draw you in to buying the magazine. The front cover is what sells a magazine because it is the first thing you will see when looking at a magazine. The title of the magazine needs to tell the consumer strait away the genre of music for example ‘Vibe Magazine’ tells you the music genre is chilled out music whereas ‘KERRANG Magazine’ tells us that the genre is rock and metal because the title is strong and bold as the music is. The text on the cover needs to draw you around the image on front and the text needs to give the audience questions to draw them in to reading the magazine for example there could be a quote on the front cover and when the consumer reads the quote they will have questions such as ‘why did they say this?’ which will draw them. The cover sells the magazine and therefore it needs to be eye catching and interesting and those are a few crucial points to making the cover appeal to the reader.

The function of a contents page is to tell the reader small pieces of information about what’s in the issue of the magazine and give page numbers so that the reader can get strait to the pages they want to read. The contents page should also contain another picture, possibly of the artist featured on the cover, to tell the reader a little more information of their story or interview featured in the issue. The contents should represent the audience and their genre of music and the language used should appeal to the reader e.g. using words like ‘metal fest’ when referring to a festival in a metal magazine or ‘dude’ when referring to a person, this language would not work for a magazine such as vibe because it would be towards the wrong audience and for the wrong genre. Information on the contents page should be clearly displayed for the reader and the visual style should be similar to the front cover using the same colours and texts to keep a flowing design.

The function of a Double page spread (DPS) is to have an article telling the reader about an artist or band, this should contain images artist or band and to clearly state who they are. The layout should be simple for example a large title, an image and three columns of text with pull quotes. The pull quotes on a DPS are important because they tell the reader small bits of information which pull them in to wanting to read the article to find out why that person said that. Again the visual style should be maintained to keep the theme of the magazine the same and the genre of music should be shown through this. The DPS needs to link to the front cover by having the article be relevant to a cover lines and to have the picture from the cover and the DPS to be of the same artist/band because the picture on the cover is a major selling point and makes the reader want to read about that person.