Research and planning denotating and conotating magazines

In  media studies class we had to disect and annotate magazines  to see what feature they had. Firstly our teacher instructed us to look at really simple things like what is the title? or what is the price ? just ot ease us in. Each student was given a magazine at random so for example I was given a magazine called Hammer.  Afterwards we learnt about analysing the types of adverts magazines use.  There were 4 types of promotions that we found out magazines use these were:
1. Music promotion
2. Lifestyle
3. Classified ads
4. Other


A music promotion is simply where the magazine promotes music like for instance they will place an advert advertising a new album that is coming out, like in the magazine I had had "hammer" they had a main picture on the front of an album and around 12 images advertising different songs.  The there is lifestyle magazines which are advertisments like alchaol drinks or even adverts for mobile phones. Then tere are classified adverts that Magazines often have at the back in small boxes, this type of convention is used almost universally in magazines probably because they get paid to advertise people's products. And then the last advert we look look at was other. So any advert that isnt a music, classified, or lifestyle related.


Next we look at a page in our chosen magazine that was a double page spread. This helped with research because it will allow me to see what double page spreads our meant to look like and I can implement some of the ideas that I have seen into my own double page spread. 



Look at this example of a double page spread featuring Lily Allen. The first thing I can see is the massive quote which says " people think I'm an attention seeker, but I'm just honest". This is a typical convention that is used in magazines especially when its a big article containing a interview of someone. Another think that I can take from it is the use of the image. The picture of Lily Allen takes up most of the second page and a little bit of the first. Although for this type of music magazine it looks good I don't think that this would work well If i were to do something similar in my own double page spread. But the editors of the magazine have done this pacifically because it works for there target audience. As say if this is the a 16 to 25 demographic and about a music celebrity pictures especially big ones is more likely to appeal to them. And that brings me to the text. In media we talked about the significance of how much text you use for different target audiences. So for example someone who is reader a classic rock article if probably over 25 years old and so they are more likely to read a article which is more text based, presumably because they are more intellectual, and because they have more concentration.  Now when you look at the article with Lily Allen there seems to be a reasonable amount of text but not to much. 

Also Interestingly  you would expect the article to have more female orientated colours like pink and yellow because Lily Allen is more likely going to be associated with a female audience but the article has more neutral colours for example only black white and little bit of red is used. I've learnt here that say if you have a male artist that you are doing a article on it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to use stereotypical colours. But on the other hand I still think that I am going to use the stereotypical colours because more often than not they are used in almost every magazine and I think it will go well with my work.

Another thing that I have noticed is that Lily Allen's pose is slightly masculine which shows that maybe she is trying to speak out the both boys and girls.  The articles tone is humerous and rude at the same time so this will of course appeal to teenagers because they are more likely understand this kind of humour.  The article is has a mixture of informal and formal language. Formal language has been used because some teenagers will be able to understand it, but informal language is still there so that it doesn't alienate anyone.