A magazine house style is a basic convention that a magazine follows in matters of detail, throughout the productions in order to maintain consistency. It is to do with language, grammar, spelling (American or British), abbreviation (S.L.F.P or SLFP), fonts, colours, picture proportions/placements etc. Generally these house styles are unique to each magazine publication.
I chose to analyse the Elle magazines’ house style.
[Examples of Elle magazine covers]
The masthead used by Elle magazine is always in the same font and size positioned at the top of the magazine page, making it pop out to the consumers when in a shelf with many other magazines. The cover image is placed either behind the masthead or in some cases superimposed over the text giving it a very nice look. The masthead appears in different colours depending on the cover image. But mostly white colour has been used and they use the Serif font, Didot for the title.
[Annotated magazine covers. Source: Google. Annotations: myself.]
What I noticed in the covers is that the background is mostly very minimalist either being gradient or a solid colour highlighting the cover image and making it stand out to the consumers.
[Elle magazine cover with solid background colour. Source: Google]
[Elle magazine cover with gradient background. Source: Google]
The cover image is always placed in the centre and tends to be a medium shot or a close up. It is rare for more than one person to be featured in the cover image.
[Elle magazine cover with Medium shot of Zayn Malik. Source: Google]
[Elle magazine cover with Close up shot of Rihanna. Source: Google]
The cover lines on the magazine use fonts that are a mix of bold, thin and rounded Serif and San Serif fonts. The cover lines generally tend to be of one particular colour (i.e. white) but in certain cases they’ve used colour font to highlight the key words. Another thing I noticed on the cover is that they place their issue number and country name around the masthead either directly above or below it in small font size and different alignments. The barcode isn’t always present on the magazine cover. The spelling and grammar used in the magazine differs based on the country it is published in (Ex: American edition uses American spelling and UK edition uses British spelling.)
[Annotated magazine covers. Source: Google. Annotations: myself.]
This research helped me to get an understanding on the conventions that I have to follow when creating a magazine of my own. Prior to the research I assumed these elements were very trivial and didn’t require much thought. However this research showed the importance of each of the small aspects that I thought to be irrelevant. This analysis assisted me in deciding the house style for my product as well.
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