Soap Opera Magazine Cover 2

Soap opera magazine, 'What's on TV'

This initial elements of this cover that immediately grab the audience's attention are the bright colours and text - 'KILL ROXY!' is in quite stricking colours that are designed to be contrasting as well as attention grabbing. As you can see to the left, all the colours used tend to contrast eachother - bright pinks, blues, yellows and reds. Used in conjunction with the bold, uppercase text the colours are used to 'shock' the audience and intrigue them about what is inside, as well as to make them connote the colours with the exaggerated drama of soap operas. These sorts of bright colours will need to be considered in our own soap opera magazine, as to be conventional as well as attention grabbing.

The majority of the text used on the magazine cover is uppercase - it is supposed to intrigue the audience and let them know what the current, popular storylines are for particular television shows. The typeface is also rather bold and thick, compared to standard fonts such as Ariel and Times New Roman. The bold text is used, once more, to attract the audience. Other pieces of text give information on the price of the magazine, the title of it and the issue date. The sizing of the different texts also indicates which are the most important - in this case, it is the large 'KILL ROXY!' text. Factors such as text size, font and letter case will need to be considered in our own soap opera magazine.

Another attention grabbing, main part of the cover are the two characters on the right of the cover. These are familiar, known faces to the audience of Eastenders who would be aware of the relationship between the two and the storylines surrounding them. Their storyline is the selling point for the magazine, as seen by how large they are when compared to other characters shown and the logo of the magazine. Each of these little storylines are put in their own sections, with different shapes, such as circles or squares, with appropriate captions. These are common conventions of soap opera magazines, and we will have to use them in our own magazine cover for it to be conventional and effective.

There are key elements of this magazine cover, such as the price tag, magazine title, issue date and barcode, which are small in comparison to the rest, but are still important. We will need to include these in our own magazine cover for it to actually be a soap opera magazine cover.

This analysis will assist us in creating our own soap opera magazine cover, as we will be able to use typical conventions such as colour, layout and text that audiences will already be familiar with and for the cover to be succesful and effective.