Diabolique Magazine Annotation

05:38

The background of a horror magazine tends to be quite dark and dull to follow the conventions of a horror magazine cover. This cover background is a dark shade of red, and this is a conventional colour in horror as is black and white. These colours have connotations of dark, death, blood and the binary opposites of the innocence and the evil. Magazine covers are likely to have one main image, with a few additional images. This is what has been done in this magazine cover as there is one main image which is linked to the text at the bottom of the magazine. The use of other images on the cover relate to the other cover stories on the magazine cover, helping the reader with the navigation around the magazine cover. There is also a faint image of the location of the place where that particular film is set, this allows the reader to understand partly about the narrative of the film. The masthead always has the same layout, typography and colours which are featured in every issue and this is allowing the reader to be able to identify the brand within any issue to recognise it straight away when they see it visually.

The imagery on the magazine cover is actually illustrations and painted images and therefore, it shows that this magazine cover is partly unconventional. The typography that has been used for the headline story and cover stories are written in Gothic fonts which makes it more appropriate for the genre and theme of the magazine. We are instantly able to tell what genre this magazine is by looking at the colours, images and the typography used within the magazine cover. The changes in the colour of the typography allows us to understand the importance of the text and the text that is aimed to attract the readers’ attention first.

There is a barcode at the bottom of the left hand corner of the magazine cover, this is a code that is conventional as it is placed at the front of the magazine. Some magazines tend to have the barcode at the back of the magazine or within the magazine, however by having the barcode elsewhere makes it harder for the reader to find it straight away and this may put them off if they’re planning to buy the magazine in a rush. There is the price and the issue number near the barcode which also helps the reader identify the information that is needed.

There is no use of synergy on the cover of the magazine regarding social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter, which is a disadvantage as some people may be more interested in viewing the updates on social networking sites rather than on paper. However, there is the website link included on the cover of the magazine which is useful for people wanting to view some of the content online as anyone can access the information through cross-media convergence.