Contents Page Research

This is my first attempt at drafting my Contents Page, before I had done any research on contents pages and just using my previous knowledge of Music Magazines. After browsing through some music magazines, I realised that I'd have to make some drastic changes so I took some photos of some contents pages and analysed them.



This is the contents page for the music magazine The Word. It doesn't appear to use the standard convention of red logo for the name of a music magazine however it does use a red colour to help bullet point some of the favourite articles selected by The Word editor. This particular contents page seems to rely more heavily on text rather than pictures which can be clearly seen from the next contents page, however, it does use some images to break down some of the text. One of the images is of the editor which accompanies his letter on this page. The larger image suggests that this magazine is unusual as it isn't often that you would find a man kissing a monkey! Most of the images on this page are strange and don't really relate much to the theme of music. A common colour used is blue which suggests that this magazine appeals more to the male audience. The date is at the top right hand side of the page just underneath "contents". To allow the target audience, which I think are between the ages of 20 - 30 years, they have included a website address for them to check out as well as a teaser of "Subscribe! Special Offer!" to entice them in to buying more magazines. I believe that the target audience are young males between 20 and 30 as the magazine has a strange sense of humour which is more leanient towards this age group.

This contents page is taken from Q magazine. It includes the typical red logo of "Q" throughout the page, first at the top left hand corner by the page number and also next to "Q Review". This contents page relies more on images to allow the readers to find the page that they want faster as they will recognise the image, see the page number and flick to that page. It makes it easier and quicker for them to get what they want out of the magazine, however, it does also have a lot of text to not only describe more about the articles on that page but to also allow different titles of the articles to hopefully interest the readers. The font style is constant throughout this page and the titles of the articles are in capitals whilst the description is smaller and beneath the title. Page numbers to the articles are situated to the left to allow the reader to read the page number first and also for it to be found more easier than having to read all of the article title and description. The date of this particular issue is placed at the top left of the page and takes up a little square of room. Dr Who figures are also used which are related to this particular issue (the dalek and cyberman). These pictures are also accompanied with the red page number to allow it to stand out on the white background. Black text is used to make sure the writing stands out from the white background and is also what the readers are used to reading from.