Research and Planning - Double Page Spread Analysis

This is my double page spread analysis taken from the magazine 'Vibe'. The article features the hip-hop icon Wiz Khalifa. Although it doesn't completely fit into the genre I am following - which is RnB - I have chosen it anyway as the genre's can often be easily mistaken and dip in and out of one another. Another reason I have for choosing this article is that it includes a fairly large amount of features I can pull apart and analyse. 

             Firstly the photo of the celebrity used is a close-up showing his face and partially; his shoulders. In the photo we can see he is smoking. In general these days smoking is often perceived to be negative, and also associated with the whole imagine of rappers. Linking to the photo of him smoking is the subtitle of the article 'How High?' This connatates that the celebrity could be smoking the drug Marijuana - a highly controversial topic. Due to this being an illegal drug this drastically makes the audience of the magazine much smaller. I would expect the audience now to only include teenagers - because of things such as the British television programme 'Skins' centring around partying and drug taking whilst being of college age. 

              Another thing we can see in this photo is the fact that the subject seems to have a lot of tattoo's - another thing we often associate with teenage rebellion (even though they are becoming more popular with a range of age groups). Tattoo's are also associated with the stereotype of what we imagine rappers too be like, and the representation we receive from this is of rappers all fitting into the stereotype. 

              The layout of the article is simple, with the photo taking up the whole left page and two columns towards the bottom of the right hand side page. The two columns are neat, but also wide. This shows that the article will make for easy reading rather than lots of long columns. The typography used at the top of the page or the title says 'WK' standing for Wiz Khalifa. The colours of this title are black and orange, the orange exactly matching the shade of orange on our celebrity's hat and thus creating a link. The way the title is wrote looks big and bold and also the contrast in colours subtly draws the readers attention to it, so that if you were flicking through the magazine quickly your attention would be drawn to this article and make you more inclined to read it. The colour scheme of this article is very plain, however the black and white make the orange look very dramatic and 'pop' out to you.