College Magazine – Textual Analysis

Highly feminine colour scheme makes the magazine’s target audience fairly obvious, the subject of the cover shoot and her pose/attire reinforce the notion that this text is aimed at adolescent girls in college. Heavily stylized text is intertextual to fonts used in cover lines for fashion magazines such as Vogue or Elle, this gives the idea that this magazine is trying to represent itself as being a more sophisticated college magazine through its use of fashion industry genre conventions.

The obvious use of heavy airbrushing connotes glamour and shows the magazine as being a highly polished text, yet its poor implementation gives the cover an overall unprofessional and somewhat cheap look. The subjects pose is highly unconventional of a magazine aiming to represent itself as being a part of the fashion genre. Her makeup and hair are not nearly immaculate enough , her clothing looks cheap and the shot does not flatter her figure of make her look thin enough to be in conformation with modern day fashion/modelling conventions. Using the fact that this is a college magazine we can assume that the girl featured on the cover is nothing more than a student volunteering for the job, which also means that she is highly unlikely to be seen actually inside the magazine. You would think that if she is just to be a figurehead they would have been more attentive to the composition of their cover, and made it look more conventional which in turn would add to the appeal to its target audience.

The use of typography in this cover is perhaps the most interesting feature through their use of symbols to replace various letters in their text, I think this is done to further the magazines relation to its target audience. The way it almost mimics modern day ‘text-speak’ further strengthens its connection to its adolescent target audience. The use of partially italicised cover lines is also interesting in its implied statements about the subject matter. For example where it says “SEX, DRUGS & SAFETY” the first two words are in italics, whereas the word safety is emboldened. This signifies its heightened importance in comparison to the other two.

Conclusively I think this magazine performs rather poorly in its intended purpose, I’ve seen better but also worse. The overall look is unconventional without being effective, however if the cover image was perhaps reworked, this magazine would be massively improved in my opinion.