Annotations of music magazines

My next task was to look at a real life example of a music magazine and dismantle essential parts of the publication in order to understand how all of the components work together. For this, I selected the latest issue of NME because I felt that it could be a prime role model and influence for my planned magazine and also, the fact that it's a brand new publication would suggest that it's very up to date according to what their target audience wants. This first photo shows my annotations about what I found effective and interesting on the cover page and contents page. My annotations, as you can see, go into a lot of detail about different codes and conventions.

This image shows the annotations of the contents page in more detail and the start of my annotations surrounding the double page interview with music legend John Lennon.

In this picture, you can see my extended notes and annotations into both sides of the interview. I focused on both pages separately because although they are presented together, they both contain varying factors that allow the two pages not to look the same and be about the same thing. So, they contain different components and compose varying mise-en-scenes yet they both work together as a diverse and varied article.

This is another head on shot of the interview which gives a brief idea of the amount of detail I went into my notes with.

From this exercise, I learnt that I am in fact strongly influenced by NMEs magazines as they embody the theme and styles that I would ideally like to incorporate into my magazine. This factor really helps me as it's almost like having an aspirational piece which I can try and replicate some aspects from. By writing notes alongside the cut outs and being able to pick apart essential elements from NME, it has aided me in seeing what really does make a magazine what it is and how it uses techniques such as persuasion to attract a larger area of audience.