Magazine Conventions

The first thing I needed to do before I started working on any magazine ideas, was to analyse as many magazines as I could to understand the conventions and purposes of them.

To understand the differences between men's and women's magazines, I needed to analyse them separately. This is exactly what did, and it worked really well! It made me see how contrasting the two are, and how expectations for magazines aimed at the two sexes really differ.

The main conventions of a magazine are the layout (masthead, coverlines, left hand side holds majority due to stacking system in shops, main image, connecting colours), an image representing an idealised version of what the audience want to be like or have, price and barcode. When first seeing what holds a magazine together, you can easily think it is very simple and easy. But through all my analysis, I've found that there are a lot of ways you can be persuaded into buying the magazine without even realising! Sometimes it's as simple as a rhetorical question, eg "do you want to get rid of fat?" of course the majority of the world could answer that with a 'YES' and they buy the magazine. Sometimes they can put an ideal person for the age group on the front cover and immediately, you want to read the magazine in order to feel closer to that being; a lot of the covers I looked at had an attractive person on the front, which is exactly for that purpose.

The main points I found for men and women's magazines that are extremely contrasting were:

• Women's magazines tended to have a woman on the front fully clothed, smiling, and pulling a respectable pose. Men's on the other hand, sometimes had good looking, healthy men on the front, (for example in Men's Health magazine) or a very provocatively presented female who pulls a pose rather than smiles naturally.
• Men's magazines used capital letters a lot more than female magazine's did. Perhaps this is trying to represent STRENGTH for the men and gentle, feminity for the women.
• Women's magazines are a way for the female to escape, become a better person and improve themselves (in most cases). For men, they are usually revolved around funny stories, sex and outrageous behaviour (appealing to young men) and otherwise focused on fitness.