Contents Page

After changing my front cover, I knew I needed a whole new look for my contents page. Still thinking about my inspirations; Vogue, Elle etc, I decided to concentrate on designing a contents page that was simple, yet stylish. To begin with, I sketched a design that I thought would suit the ideology of my magazine:

I didn't want to make my page like a typical music magazine contents page and fill it up with pictures and colours so I stuck to a white background. Obviously, this made the detailed design harder for me, as I had to fill up enough white space to create a professional look without completely over doing it. So, although in my sketch I had four pictures in total, I decided to cut this down to just one for my final page.

I chose a low angle picture because I wanted to give a slightly distorted to the reader, to show that the simplicity of my contents page was not necessarily the same throughout the whole magazine. I also chose this picture because it could be linked to my editorial, like I had the idea of originally, or it could become an advert for an article about the subjects in the picture. I used photoshop first to enhance the picture because I wanted the natural bright blue of the sky to stand out more against the black and white of my subjects:

I then added the title. I wanted to give cohesion to my magazine, so I brought the colours, font and style of my magazine title "The Classic" into my contents page. This link to the cover gives a uniform affect to the reader.

For the rest of the text, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to go for. So I played around with a few different fonts and, after looking through some existing magazines, I came up with this style:

When I had decided on my text style, I added in the rest of my contents. I wanted to give my magazine the look of a glossy magazine, so I filled it up with articles and features. This look of fullness was emphasised by the way I squashed each headline up against its page number.

I wanted a small editorial piece in my contents page because I had like the one in the NME contents page that I analysed. The text needn't be anything to do with the rest of the issue but I wanted it to link with the ideology of "The Classic". I did this by making it about the Beatles; a classic and brilliant band.

So, I added this text and then felt that I needed some sort of call out or free gift to draw my readers in. I had also noticed that in a lot of existing magazines, there was an advert about subscription. So, I combined this idea with the idea of a competition or offer and came up with 50% off subscription. This added the necessary detail to my contents page to fill it up.

The finishing touches were to add a small picture in the bottom corner and a tag-line across the top to give another offer. The bar across the top also gave a slight border affect, which made the page more uniform.

This was my final contents page: