NME stands for New Musical Express and is a weekly magazine which has been running since March 1952. The current magazine costs £2.30 to purchase and has 66 pages. I am specifically looking and reviewing September 25th 2010 issues, which has on the front Carl Barat.
Starting off by looking at the magazine in general and the front cover I notice that NME magazine is about 1cm wider than most magazines, and seems a lot thinner. This week's front cover has Carl Barat on it, I personally don't like this cover very much. The colours are used well, the main ones being Red, Blue, White and Black but I think the image in the background is not very well edited. I think that the contrast is a bit off, and makes everything look out of focus. I think that NME want everything to be out of focus so you focus on the face of Carl Barat but I personally don't like this approach. I think the white boarder around the magazine does work well. If I had to take a tip from this front cover on how to do mine it would be to have the words in bright colours, Red is very good to use.
The Contents page I think works really well. It isn't a long list which gets boring it has different images spread out across the page, with the pages not in order (having page 1
2 on the right and 36 before it in the middle). I think the contents works well because it has a white background so the images stand out well and then all catch your eye to the big stories that NME want you to see. With the pictures go some quotes from each article and a small insight into it, which doesn't give too much away but gives you a taster to go and read on. I also like the fact that the rest of what is in the magazine is in a very small column with just their headlines, these seem to be weekly things. For NME it's a good way to make sure the reader goes on to look at these as they don't know what they are so will be intrigued to look at them. NME is also very crafty, as the only time Red is used on the page is to attract the audience to a subscription to the magazine. I like this contents page, it's rather simplistic but at the same time eye catching.
Through the pages there are a lot of adverts to help bulk the magazine out, these adverts are for music and fashion based at the type of reader who likes NME, these tend to be very Indie adverts.
The main article on Carl Barat I found to be rather boring. It had a lot of q
uotes from Carl but at the start I found it to be dull, I'm not a fan of The Libertines so this isn't really my kind of article but the first few paragraphs seemed to be more of an autograph than an interview. I would have expected an interview to be talking about the new solo album Carl is releasing in October but it starts out differently. The picture to the right I also didn't like due to the blur on the gun which actually made me feel a bit dizzy to look at. On the next double page spread there was a nice big timeline of Carl's work, I liekd this feature as it wasn't too deep but gave you snippets into his career, and kept you interested.
In general I didn't like this magazine very much, the paper itself felt more like a newspaper and I didn't really enjoy the other articles. I foudn the size of the magazine to be to wide for my liking. When I do my magazine I will try to base my contents page like there's without copying it, I will also make sure I use bright colours on my front colour for key words.
2/5 Rating
Picture's Source: http://www.nme.com/magazine
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