Kerrang! Analysis

This magazine is called “Kerrang! Which has some connotations of youth and drama, its visual layout shows the main story in the middle of the page with other smaller stories shown to the left of the page with some pictures and text and it’s in columns. The magazine has the main article/story placed in the middle of the front cover showing its importance and this is shown by the much larger image complete with a large font size and the colour of the font being white or red, the style of the font is quite bold and large which helps to link to the target audience of teenagers into the metal and rock genre of music as this becomes easier to read for teenagers.

The two people on the front cover’s main image for the main story (Matt Tuck and Liam Cormier) are wearing  greyish jeans with one of them being complete with a black leather jacket showing or displaying the youth of the two men therefore aiming the target audience to the younger generation of people (around ages 14-21). Both men also have very long hair which also does represent the target audience of ages around 14-21 and it’s also aimed at people who are more into the rock and metal genres of music rather than pop or alternative genres of music. This issue of the magazine is being promoted with a headline that’s almost promoting a boxing match, “Bullet For My Valentine vs. Cancer Bats” this suggests a violent image to the magazine and it may go with the target audience of younger people around ages 14-21. The colours are a mixture of bright, dull and also dark which reflects the youth oriented audience feel and representing Matt Tuck and Liam Cormier to be “less serious” musicians. This is also added with their facial expressions, Matt has his eyes wide open and Liam is making an obvious gesture that he’s whispering into his ear because the story is about “supergroup secrets”.

The contents page in this magazine actually has another page before it advertising a "limited edition kick energy drink", showing again how Kerrang! likes to use pioneering techniques such as this limited edition and one off version of product. The contents pages visual layout is as follows,  theres an image which is fairly large on the left hand side of the page, to the right there is a column which displays whats inside the issue and whats on each page and at the bottom of the page there is a column from the editor of this issue of the magazine.

The language used in this magazine is used to persuade the reader to purchase it, certain phrases used such as “Architects split-drama” and “Kurt Cobain: New solo record emerges” suggests that Kerrang! is a pioneering magazine that has lots of one off exclusives that can be offered to the reader when they buy the magazine.

One of the magazines double page spreads is about the band Architects and as said on the front cover it is a “split-drama” story. The image on the spread is of the band and they’re all tied by the hands with tape over their mouths suggesting this particular story to be violent or very “strong worded”. The layout of the spread is as follows, the image of the band is in the middle with 5 columns on the bottom section of the page and 1 long column to the left of the page with a ripped or cut out effect on it. The colour of the headline is red and this shows connotations of “blood” and “violence”.