Content Research

Each magazine has a certain house style. This can be trademark colours, logos, fonts or the language used. I'm trying to find what sort of conventions are used, and how they target their audience.

http://www.nme.com/ - NME are recognised for their use of the colours black, red and white. If they used varying colours for each issue, a potential consumer may not pin point the NME magazine. They obviously use the font and colour for the masthead each time, if they changed this the audience would be very confused as to which magazine it is. I am going to have to select a 2 or 3 colours as my whole magazine theme, and a general font that runs through.
NME have quite an up front style of writing, they are not scared to use expletives, which may isolate some readers. The ratio of image to text is about even, the text used always includes the most important facts/quotes, sometimes they elaborate on their stories. When it comes to interviews though they tend to stick to the story. From this evidence you can start to see that NME is not aimed at a reader that wants the ins and outs of the musical melodies, but just to know a bit about the artists inspiration and the artist themselves.

http://www.kerrang.com// - Kerrang use a mixture of different colours along their cover. But, the font for the more important information generally tends to be yellow or white. The background for the cover is liable to be black, or at least dark, reasons being that it is more recognisable and suits the theme of the magazine.
The font throughout the Kerrang is constant. It is always worn and ragged looking, with everything in capitals.
The actual content of Kerrang is a bit more light hearted than Q or NME magazine, in the sense that it doesn't have as much text and although the articles can be serious they tend to edge on the side of fun. There are a lot of  images in Kerrang compared to the image count of some of it's rivals.

I think i prefer the style of NME, there is less on the page to look at, and the use of a maximum of three colours, which gives it a more sophisticated look. Although, i do like the style of the constant worn font that Kerrang uses the whole way through their magazine.