Research in to double paged spreads and Contents pages

Double Paged Spreads & Contents Pages.

I looked at layouts, content, fonts, photographs and colour themes in rock magazines, NME, Kerrang and Rock sound to get ideas for my magazine. I found that colours such as black and red where consistent in many of the rock magazines although occasionally the colour schemes where changed depending on the content of the page e.g for a 'Goth' heavy metal type band the colours were mainly black where as for an 'Indie' band who's music wasn't as heavy light colours like blues where used and white back grounds . As for layouts there wasn't much consistency in layout it seemed to depend on the size of the image and how much text there was. I did find that text was usually put into columns in the articles which is something I'd keep in mind for when i do my double pages spread. The same 3 or 4 fonts are often used through out the magazine for continuity, except for things meant to stand out such as quotes and band names which i think looks effective. There was also a variety of photographs, I found that in most of the images the models/ band members looked directly at the camera and it looks as if they are looking directly at the reader. However there where a few images where the band member did not look directly at the camera, but i think it is more effective when they do. Other than that i found the photograph were all very different maybe to set the 'vibe' of that band, for instance the top right image is in black and white because that band is supposed to be dark, Gothic heavy metal band however the middle image on the bottom row the band is wearing fancy dress and looking like they are easy going and just having a laugh, because they are supposed to be more of an indie band.

I found that most of the magazines i looked at kept a similar layout for their contents page each week, and the contents pages from each magazine all had similarities in layout.Most of the contents pages included images with page numbers on them which i liked, because the reader can you see the image and think oh that's . . . and turn straight to the page, its also an effective way of breaking up lists of text and page numbers. The colour schemes on contents pages seem to be similar to the ones on the front page, the font also seems to be the same as used on the front.