Front cover analysis - NME

NME is a music magazine targeted at a very mixed target audience. The magazine covers different genres such as indie and rock.
The main image is of band member Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance, which is the main article in this magazine. The image is shot from a high angle, giving him an ‘attitude’ look about him. It also makes it seem like extra eye contact is given by him to the audience,since he is actually looking up at the camera. The focus is mainly on his face and expression with the rest of his body and plain background being slightly out of focus. Unlike most of the other front covers I have analysed, this magazine does not make the main image it’s priority. The other articles and text overlap and cover parts of the image. Another image on the front cover is on the top right hand side and is a photo of the band ‘U2’. It is placed there on a slight angle and bordered in red with text below it to make it stand out. There are four other smaller rectangular images at the top of the front cover. These are promoting and showing the reader the free posters that are inside the magazine.
There is a distinctive red white black and gold looking colour scheme which works very well for this magazine colour. The red, which could symbolise the anger steriotype this magazine has seems to highlight all the main points on the front cover. This is because the masthead, main articles and free gifts are either written in red font or highlighted with a red background. There is a little section of text which is written in yellow. This could have been used not only for it to stand out, but because it is referring to something completely off topic – ‘Twitter’.
All of the font on the front cover is the same. This keeps the cover basic but effectively neat and tidy. The font is similar to ‘Arial’ so it keeps the magazine modern looking. The main article takes up the majority of the page, so with the image along side it makes the whole of this cover revolve around the one article.
Overall, this cover has quite a boxed styled layout, which covers parts of the main image – which to me is the most important feature on a front cover. Unlike this front cover, I will make my image stand out more and use less boxes to separate my text and articles. I will however take in to account the effectiveness of using only a minimum amount of text fonts, as I think it makes the magazine look more sophisticated and professional.