NME & Rolling Stone: Brand Identity & Values

Brand Identity: How all of the different elements and characteristics of a variety of a brand's front covers distinguish the brand to the audience, e.g. masthead, house style, layout, font, etc.

Brand Values: What the brand is attempting to represent through the product or brand.

As the majority of music magazines do (including Rolling Stone), NME makes use of the colours red, white and black in its logo. Its masthead changes from cover to cover to suit the layout for that particular issue, and the layout of each issue depends on the artist being featured. In this way, NME adapts well to each artist's style, capturing the attention of those interested in that style. 

Something that is consistent in each issue, however, is the use of Sans-Serif font for the masthead. Sans-Serif is a font which is considered contemporary, youthful and fresh, and attracts a young and modern target audience. The featured artists are usually young and often relatively new to the music industry, which also attracts younger readers. Its inconsistency in colour schemes for each cover of an issue and its bold covers attract a constantly changing and contemporary audience.

In contrast the slight inconsistency of NME, Rolling Stone's magazine covers are almost always identical in layout and masthead design. The masthead is always across the top of the magazine cover and is in red, white and black, like the majority of music magazines. The cover photo is usually a close up or mid shot and occasionally somewhere between a long and mid shot of the featured artist, and in the majority of pictures the subject is making eye contact with the camera to involve the audience.

The masthead is always in Serif font, which is considered to be formal, sophisticated and established, attracting perhaps an older, more traditional and conservative target audience. Although the photos do feature some young artists, quite often Rolling Stone will feature an older artist, or at least an artist with more traditional music produced, to attract more refined readers to the magazine.