Q Contents Page Research

This is a contents page from Q Magazine published February 2013. The contents page is image dominated focusing on the artists from the main articles in the magazine. This seems to be a consistent theme through contents pages as NME did the same. I like the idea and want to do this when creating my contents page. It helps to bring focus on these articles and artists as well as making the page more exciting and appealing to view. They haven't singled out a main article, instead they have placed them around a centre circle using images of each artist with a small preview of the article. Again this seems to be a consistent convention throughout the design of contents pages so I will use the same idea when designing mine. The images each have a different layout, some are in boxes with a border and others aren't in boxes and are arranged in front of everything else to stand out. Giving each individual article preview a different layout makes them all interesting in a different way. The Biffy Clyro and the David Bowie articles stand out from the rest as they are arranged at the front. This is done as they are the most famous artists on the contents page making it more appealing to a larger audience. However the centre circle is on top of the Biffy Clyro preview but behind the David Bowie, making the David Bowie image stand out the most. The image is also placed exactly in the middle third, reaching the viewers eye sight immediately. I want to give my contents page image previews a unique layout design as it helps to make each article appeal interesting and different. My idea is to take this further and make the layout design match each artists unique style by playing with colouring and lighting. This will help each article to stand out further as different and unique. The individual layout has meant they have had to play around with the house style, especially the colouring. The colour scheme for Q is red and white, they have kept to the colour scheme well while designing each preview. Some of them use a white box behind red and black font while others just use white font on top of the image. All the text is easy to read and again backs the idea of each article being unique. Although this is done well I want my text to be separate from the image, this will make the images clearer to see and add more attention to them. It also means I can keep my font style consistent throughout the contents page.