Music Magazine Contents Page First Draft - Step-by-step

As you will soon see, there were much fewer steps involved in the creation of the contents page than there were in the creation of the front cover. This is due to the fact that the contents page is made up mainly of text, and since text is very easy to edit one doesn't need to save their work quite so regularly as when working with layout and images. I did say before though that there are going to be a lot of changes, so chances are there will be many more production steps after the ones shown. Before the actual stages though, I am going to show the rough contents ideas/plans that I drew out and scanned in:

Although I had actually already applied effects in Photoshop to the main photo a while before deciding to use it, I shall try to remember in detail what I did to it. I know the main thing I did was pump up the contrast and brightness. I also experimented with lighting effects, but only applied very small ones as they made too much of a difference otherwise. I also changed the exposure, offset and gamma correction settings. The overall combination of these effects made the picture's background mostly completely white, whitened Kerry's face and made less thick strands of hair appear as a sort of yellowy light, and despite my lack of technical image terms I thought all of which looked pretty cool. I then just had to cut around Kerry using the lasso and then put the picture into a contents page-sized canvas.
Now the image had been sorted I next decided to put a smaller version of my masthead at the top left of the page, so as to reinforce the idea of a house-style/brand identity. Next to it I put a date and issue number to comply with music magazine conventions; I also made the font they were in Oceania which is the same font used for the masthead. I added a caption for the photo which would tell the reader what story the picture relates to and on which page one can find out more. I did this because from my music magazine research I saw that nearly all photos on the contents page have a caption such as this, and so my having one would further allow me to abide by music magazine conventions and therefore make my magazine look more realistic. At this point I used the Calibri font, due to its simplicity which made it unobtrusive and easy to read. The final thing I did during this first stage was add a "Features" heading, since as can be seen from my plans I had already decided to separate my contents page into the three categories of Features, Regulars and Reviews.

Here I added the other two section headings of "Reviews" and "Regulars". I changed the font for these and "Features" from Tahoma bold to Lucida Sans Typewriter; the reason for this was that I felt the Tahoma bold font became too fat-looking when made the text a bigger size, and when I took off the bold it looked too skinny. I tried a variety of different fonts and found that Lucida Sans Typewriter looked fairly similar but wasn't what I considered too fat or skinny. I then changed the font of the photo's caption to Lucida Sans because it was just as comfortably simple as Calibri and also meant that I wouldn't have to use too many different fonts, since that could have made the contents page look tacky and unprofessional (my research showed that music magazines try to limit the number of fonts they use unless they're going for a specific feeling, such as scary or happy). For this same reason I also used Lucinda Sans for my page number, my Kerry Anne heading and my story summary. I noticed that on both the Mojo and Q contents pages the cover story is labelled "Cover Story" so as to separate it from the rest of the features and draw attention to it. I decided to do a similar thing for my contents page, which is why there is a box with "Cover Story" written in it. I used red on black since they were both colours already present on the contents page (which is good for reasons similar to those about not using too many different fonts) and it manages to catch the eye, and that is after all the point of having it. The layout I had begun to instigate is fairly similar to the top left possible layout on my second page of rough contents ideas.

The change here is that I added all the contents page text. As you can see by comparing it with my first page of rough contents ideas, a lot of the things on there were either the same as or adapted from what I had originally planned to write. There were also many things that I had come up with during the production of the front cover, such as Rockability and Leanne Bell, and these I needed to include to retain the continuity between the things on the cover of a magazine and the things on its contents. I moved the "Cover Story" box down so that it was between the page number and Kerry Anne, since I felt that in its previous position it was wasting a line of space and also just looked a bit awkward. I had to erase some of the nice yellow effect around Kerry's hair to make room for the text as I felt that placing the text over it didn't look very good. I then had to arrange each line of text individually to make them fit around the picture.

For this final stage I made only very small changes in a somewhat futile attempt to make the contents page more interesting. I thought that another photo could spice it up a bit, so I placed one where it would not affect the layout too much and where it would be relevant; this photo ended up being of an old man next to "The Good Ol' Days" section. It is relevant and doesn't affect the layout, but despite this still looks pretty bad. I also, as said in the last blog post, desaturated the photo to make it appear older. I tilted it as well to make it more interesting. To make room for the photo I had to Kerry Anne caption to the left of her picture; I actually preferred this to where it was previously as it utilised what was previously empty space.