Blog 2: Codes and Conventions on a Magazine cover

Codes and conventions

For the front cover of the magazine, we can see that it has a mast head (Black Clover Spellbound By Shonen Anime!) that's been positioned in the middle of the front page, slighty being covered by the central image, written in a big, sans serif font that is in colour to show the audience what the magazine is leading the audience to and who it's made by. What I like about this is how they've set it out in a way the audience can see what they are reading, and what it's based on. It gives them more interest and more time to reflect on what type of magazine it is. It makes the audience feel aware that the massive title displaying in the middle, showing them that it's the main feature in a specialist world. Secondly, on the front cover you can see an image of the character's gaze, as we can see the sharpness in the character's eyes, due to the flame that's reflecting on them, which drags the attention to the audience to make them more focused on the character's actions. We can see that they have added a lot of mise on scene due to the use of vivid colour (make them stand out), costume and a lot of subtitles such as 'Cosplay! Toys! Games!' and 'Exclusive Jojo's Bizarre Adventure poster inside' which can bring excitement to the audience because maybe children would want to try it out for themselves, and are desperate to continue looking through the pages, and that there is a lot to discover. It can bring the addiction to anyone who admires specialist magazines and making them want it so much that the person feels ill without it. We can also see that it's mentioned '32-pages of free manga' to make the audience wanting to keep reading through if they are highly interested. Also, it increases the chances of an article to be read through and could rise up the amount of sales it gets. Furthermore, if you can see at the very bottom, it has a barcode, which shows that it's a print magazine. However, on digital magazines, there's a 0% chance that you don't get barcodes.

Pocket magazines

This is the inside of the magazine:

So as we take a look inside, we can see that it has some main features that we expect inside a magazine. We can see that it has a title 'Spellbound!' to give a bit of background on what the magazine article is really about to the audience and what they are going to be seeing along the way. Secondly, we have the blurb. It's in a sans serif font, white, which gives us the meaning about the article before the audience starts reading it. It gives them more background information about it so they have a better understanding. For the article underneath the blurb and title, at the beginning, it has a drop capital. There's a purpose for a drop capital in a magazine article. They are an effective way of grabbing readers attention because they add personality, style and visual strength to the page. We also have the page design of the article. We can see that they have included bright colours, effects such as explosive flames to make the audience feel action packed, as they are stepping into a world full of action and suspense when they ponder through.