Denotation:
The magazine cover consists of a colour photograph of a woman looking directly at the camera. The type of shot is a cross between a mid shot and a long shot, showing her head, arms, chest, waist and half of the legs from the knee upwards. The woman in the picture is standing up in front of a background; the background is a grey colour and a lighter gray at the bottom and a darker gray at the top, also the photograph cover the whole of the front of the cover. At the side of the woman’s right shoulder is the masthead “Q”, and in front of her are 8 separate cover-lines in black, red and white. The cover-lines are spilt up by colour as so; black, red, black, red, black and then a cover-line above that in white, black and red. A barcode is visible in the bottom right corner. There is also a puff above the barcode.
Masthead:
The masthead for ‘Q’ is definitely very distinctive seeing as it is one letter, always in the top left corner and is in a red block and the letter Q itself is in white. The Q is not in serif font. The font used is similar to that used in the brand name of the sweets ‘M&M’ which connotes sweet, enjoyable, tasteful and colourful. The masthead takes up almost ¼ of the page, and is modern, and is easy on the eye.
Character:
The person in the photograph on the contents page is the young successful American singer ‘Lady Gaga’.
Composition:
She is posed in a very suggestive ‘come and get me’ kind of way. Her pose, body language, stance, and “clothing” as you may call it are very seductive, sexy, suggestive and provocative.
Costume:
Her clothing is made up of hot black latex trousers she isn’t wearing a top she is merely covering her chest with her right hand, but on both of her hands she is wearing black devil finger gloves. This ‘costume’ has definitely been picked out for a specific audience, and that audience is males and there is no particular age limit. One of the gloves fingers is in her trousers which is very provocative.
NVC:
Her non verbal communication is very seductive and suggestive. Her mouth is slightly open showing her white teeth, and the kind of makeup she is wearing brings out her eyes which make the look like she is starring directly into the readers eyes.
Lighting:
The lighting is very dark and gloomy implying it’s a late afternoon and a rainy day, but that goes with lady gaga’s clothing because her clothing is very dark and mysterious.
Setting:
There is little, if no setting at all the dark grey murky background connotes mysterious, gloomy, inconspicuous and frustration, this could be because lady gaga is such a mysterious character and there are loads of rumours and speculation about her and her being.
Cover-Lines:
The main cover-line that relates to her photograph says: “Lady GaGa: Has Risen”. This is making reference to an album that had come out a few months before the interview called ‘The Fame Monster’ released in 2009. This music was pop, electropop and dance. That would link to her costume in this because it is very funky and hip. There are also over cover-lines that are either highlighted in white or a black cover-line followed by a red cover-line. There are also other musicians featured on the front of this magazine, Jedward, John Lyndon, Slash and Julian Casablanca’s. That is a real mix of musicians and music genres you got Jedward who are hip hop and pop, slash who are heavy metal, blues and hard rock and Julian Casablanca’s who does indie rock and so on. Now that is a big variety of musicians showing that they are appealing to a very big audience.
Target Audience:
Considering all of the above points that I have mentioned, the likely target audience would be male and female but a split of 60:40 male to female, roughly aged 15-49 this is because the younger audience the 15-28 would be more interested in Lady GaGa and Jedward so on, because they are young and hip and then the 30-50 for the people like Slash who is a old hard rocker, however don’t get me wrong the older generation may listen to younger music and vice versa. The people would be very knowledgeable about popular culture, the older generation and the younger generation.