Cover and contents research summary

Entry number 9- Summary of cover and contents page research:

The covers and contents pages' of real life magazines are similar to an extent.

Cover:

Most of the cover pages I researched were all of similar design, where it included a Z/C layout which encourages the reader to turn the page at the bottom right corner. They all had most of the magazine conventions such as a masthead, selling line, slogan, coverlines, features, centre image, bright colour palette and a variety of fonts. 

The masthead in all 3 magazines were all the biggest text on the cover, so the brand/name of the magazine stands out. The coverlines are all mostly bold and black, which stands out incontrast to the backgrounds. The colours in all the magazine covers connotes meaning, for example, in the 'Happiful' magazine the majority of the magazine is blue which is a serene and calming colour that symbolises serenity, stability, inspiration, wisdom or health and in the 'W I life' magazine the majority of the colour is a yellow green from the river bed. It symbolizes nature and the natural world as well as new beginnings and growth which links to the magazine topic which aims to inspire people. The fonts used for both W I life and happiful were both san serif which is a masculine type font that 'shouts' at the readers especially because they are bold.

Contents:

The two contents pages I analysed were from 'Happiful' and 'Platinum' magaazines. The two were very similar in terms of layout and composition. For example, the page numbers weren't in order of lowest to highest but were catagorised by topics e.g. 'wellbeing' or 'relationships', similarly to an index There are also certain images with large bold page numbers, these are the highlights of the magazine, e.g. in the 'Happiful' magazine page 17 represents the blue image with a girl looking up which was actually the front cover of the magazine, which intrigues the reader into flipping to page 17 and reading what the image was actually about. 

The colour schemes of both magazines were bright colours, e.g. in 'Happiful' white and light blue colours were used with black bold text which contrasts well against the light colours. Whereas in the 'Platinum' magazine there were a few more extra colours added to the contents page rather than just the few colours that were used on the front cover; like pink, blue, purple, green...etc.