I am looking at the 29 October 1988 edition of NME. The layout is evidently very different - maybe less people bought it in the post, so the hundreds of captions were not added on to the covers by the owners of NME (like what I previously talked about). This helps the design of music magazine covers a lot, as the design can be changed from issue to issue, giving much greater possibilities to designers. And because it is not a very crowded cover, the potential readers eyes are drawn to the logo very quickly, so the fact that the design may be different doesn't mean the magazines identity is.
Furthermore, the colours also help to tie the magazine together. There is a repeat of red and white, which is also used in the logo, tying the magazine together.
Another advantage of not having the cover crowded is that the photo can become more part of the design. The cover is very symmetrical, with the girl pictured one side and the writing the other. Modern NME's look the same each month, as not only other NME's but most other contemporary music magazines - and this is not the designers fault. Old NME's looked different each time, but still were able to be tied together by the simplicity, the colours, and the font.
We can see this when we look at the NME released a week before, the 22 October 1988 edition. Again, very simple, the design again focusing on a good picture rather than millions of captions. The picture helps it to differentiate from the edition released a week later, but the easy to notice logo and the simple, small amount of colours used helps to tie it together.
I would like to use some of the conventions from older designs of music magazines (before the many hundreds of captions were crammed on) and focus on a design that works with the idea of having many different genres, and incorporates this into the design, probably through colour, and also has a photo that fits into the cover, that is almost a centre piece.
