1. For my compare and contrast, I chose the two magazines I thought were most unique and
interesting. The grunge, metallic look of the rock magazine is a stark counter to the clean,
futuristic look of the Billboard magazine, which I thought would make for interesting writing.
Colour: The two magazines have
starkly different colour schemes,
with a metallic brown for the rock
magazine, and a light blue future
look for the rock magazine. This can
almost establish the age
demographic of each magazine, as
older people would be attracted to
the washed out colours of the rock
magazine, whilst the billboard
magazine has bright, multi coloured
aspects which would attract
younger people with the bright
colours.
The rock magazine has a much busier layout than the billboard magazine, the billboard
magazine is clean in that it only has 1 headline, with a few pieces of text scattered through out,
whilst the rock magazine has story headlines, each with a sentence of accompanying text. The
‘METALLICA’ of the rock magazine also takes up more room than the ‘reimagined dragons’ of the
billboard magazine, contributing to the bush look
I particularly like the clean look of the billboard magazine, as I find that a design that has too
much information at once can be unappealing to look at, in a word tiring.
2. For the contents page analysis , again I chose 2 designs which I thought were the most different.
Whilst the magazine on the right(referred to as Q) uses the left 1/3 of the page for it’s actual
page numbers the rest assigned to picture, the Kerrang magazine uses the bottom half for the
page numbers and then the top half for a picture. I think that the Kerrang method is better as it
allows more freedom in the picture type, however I do like the clean nature of the Q magazine
when compared to Kerrang. Kerrang makes a wider use of different font colours, typefaces and
sizes than the Q magazine, an effect which I dislike a large amount. I like the clean nature of the
Q magazine, with the same 2 fonts used for the majority of the contents page, with other fonts
used only on the main feature and headlines. In contrast, the Kerrang contents page uses some
fonts only once before discarding them, which creates a dis-coherent look in my opinion.
Both magazines use a page number
style where there is a large, single
picture with nothing more than a page
number, which is a common trait
between each magazine, although I do
not know why this happens.
The Q colour scheme is more
consistent, with reds and whites being
common where there are no pictures,
Kerrang is more sporadic with many
clashing colours throughout
3. In these two features, the camera shots are
almost entirely different, the right magazine
features the standard ‘mid shot ½, whilst the
magazine on the left uses an intertwined text
and picture format. I like the format of left
spread more, as it is more visuallt interesting,
utilizing all of the page rather than ½ in a blocky
and uninteresting manner.
The spread on the left is less of an article
than the spread on the right, indicated by
the fact that the spread on the right has
both a smaller font more space devoted to
text. The headlines of each also indicates
that their subject matters are quite varied.
Each spread actually has a similar colour scheme, grey background with sparingly used purple
text, and then white & black text for the remainder. This shows me that a 3 –colour scheme with
1 bright and 2 monochrome colours may be a n interesting colour scheme.
