Research and Planning: Magazine Analysis 1: Kerrang Magazine

• The Kerrang Magazine is a rock magazine designed to focus on popular rock bands and also promotes impressive new bands. It uses the black colour throughout to show that it is related to the rock genre of music. Black is a colour commonly associated with rock music and for a rock music magazine, it makes a lot of sense to use it.
• Like with most magazines, there is a larger central picture, advertising the main story, and smaller stories with smaller pictures either at the bottom or at the side. This is done for a number of reasons. One of these is to show which is the main story and to grab people's attention by using an image of either something their target audience is familiar with, in this case the band YouMeAtSix, or surprising them with a new image, which would most likely be of a brand new band. New bands are usually smaller stories though, as the main articles are for established bands that already have their own popularity and will entice more people to read the magazine if it contains information about bands they like.
• The different colours all stand out with a bold font. Each piece of text looks very strong, reflective of the style of music. The text is of very contrasting colour to its background, again, making it stand out, like the style of music, which stands out from the other genres as it is quite bold itself.
• All the images are either of happy looking band members, or of them looking quite stylish. This grabs the audience, wanting to see more of the band members that they love to listen to. Seeing them either happy, or looking stylish, makes them look up to them, and read more about what's behind the happy or stylish bad members.
• Extra features of the magazine are much smaller, but they are in a different colour to the rest of the text in the magazine. The reason for this is to keep the reader focused on the main articles, which are bigger because they are more important, but also to grab the reader with even more reason to purchase the magazine.
• As it is an already established, and very popular magazine, the bottom masthead is covered by the tops of images. The reason this can be done is because it is an already widely recognized magazine and its target audience would recognize Kerrang! even if they aren't regular buyers of it because it is such a popular rock music magazine.
  
• All over the page there are little pieces of text, in a very clearly coloured, strong looking font, which advertise lots of things that the magazine contains. These are here to show how much can be read about and it also shows that there are so many articles and features, even if there are some not liked, there are bound to be some that are liked.
• The coloured borders around the other features makes them stand out on the page and entices the audience to take a look at what they are, even if they aren't impressed with the main article, as it's different on the page, so it may be different inside, and taking a look at what it is gives the audience the chance to see how similar or different the feature is.
• The magazine is aimed at teenagers and very young adults as these are the type of people who are both interested in the rock scene, and would buy magazines about it. The images are often of male band members because teenage girls tend to buy the magazine, and the male band members images are appealing to them.