Contents Page Research

There are many different types of contents pages for music magazine, usually based around the genre of music that the magazine is covering. Some contents pages have lots of pictures, but some have very few pictures. An example of a magazine that has a lot of pictures on the front page is Kerrang. Kerrang is a rock magazine and it's contents page contains a lot of pictures, which makes it stand out and in your face, much like the music genre. NME and Q magazine are indie/alternative and popular music magazines respectively. They use less pictures and put more text in the contents page, making it feel more subdued and relaxed which is what the music genre tends to be like.

Based on this I think that I will add less pictures (around 2) and have more text. Some magazines have images of an album cover or album artist and have a section set aside to talk about the album. I think I will put this in my magazine as it is a very good idea, and will be a good addition to my contents page asides from just stories.

On these magazines (Kerrang, bottom, NME, bottom right and Q, right) you can see that the contents pages are split into a number of columns, usually two or three, to contain the text. I think that by using three columns I will be able to fit more stories into the contents page. If I only have two columns in my contents page the text would have to be very large to fill in all the white space, and could end up looking quite unprofessional. For this reason I will probably put three columns into my contents page.

Contents Page Design

Here is my initial design for my contents page. Overall I am fairly happy with the design but I think that if I keep exactly to the design it may end up looking quite empty. This is because I have only put in two columns of text that is quite large compared to the text on my front page design. I may re-design my contents page and split the page into three columns.

I like the positioning of where I am going to put the two photos as they will grab the readers attention, but won't dominate the whole of the page. The overall design of the contents page means that I can fit a lot of information and stories in it. I researched into the average number of pages in a weekly music magazine and found that on average there are between 60-70 pages. I will now be able to make the page numbers of the articles in the contents page seem more realistic. The border around each section of the contents page is also good as it makes each part stand out and clearly separates them from other sections.

Here is the original, unedited picture that I intend to use for the main story in my contents page. It is quite similar to the image on my front page, but the model is wearing different clothing and is in a different position. I will put the photo exactly where I did in the flat plan of my contents page as I think this is easily relatable to the image on the front page.

Here you can see the original, unedited picture that I intend to use for an album cover on the bottom of my contents page in the review section. I want to be able to make this picture look like it is from a real album cover so I will crop it down to 340 x 340 and then add in some effects on photoshop, as you never see album covers as just a plain image.

Here are some album covers that I think will work well on my contents page, so I will try to take some elements from all of them to create my own album cover.