First Draft Contents Page

First Draft Contents Page
This is the first draft of my contents page for my magazine.

• The contents page is laid out well. This means that it is extremely east to read and follow, which make the magazine much more user friendly.
• Everything is well aligned. This makes the document look extremely professional.
• I have been consistent with the use of colours and font styles, meaning that users can instantly recognise that this is my magazine by just looking at this page.
• The type of language that I have used will appeal to my target audience. It is quite informal and talks to them directly, for example, "New band DAZZLE offer you the chance to see them backstage!"

How I feel it could be improved:

• I feel that the main focus of this contents is the guitar, yet this story was not even on the front cover. That is why I feel that this main focus of the page should be on a main feature within the magazine. Also, my magazine focuses more on artists, whereas by having both images of instruments may give the wrong impression and make readers feel that it is more of a magazine about instruments.
• I have not listed the stories about the instruments in my list of features. This may leave the viewers feeling as if they are not well informed, which makes the document unprofessional.
• The word 'features' looks far too plain and uninteresting, which would not appeal to my younger target audience. I need to either change the font, or add an effect to it such as a shadow or bevel, to make it attract more attention and look more visually interesting.
  

Contents

Contents Page
This is my final contents page, which I feel was quite successful. However, I did make a few adjustments from my original draft:

• I chose to make it landscape instead of portrait. This, I felt, allowed me to be more creative, making my page much more visually interesting for the reader.
• I decided to change the colour of the page numbers to red. This stood out a lot better than if I were to use the dark green.
• I added green shapes in the background. I felt that the white background was far too plain and unappealing to the reader. The green makes it that bit more interesting.

(Please click to enlarge)

I used this contents page for inspiration, specifically how the photos were laid out. Some were rotated with the page number placed in a bigger size on top of the image. I felt that this was an interesting way of positioning the images and numbers, which is why I chose to place my images in a similar style to this.
However, I did not like the white background, which is why I added some interesting shapes to mine to make it more visually interesting and appeal to my target audience.

Contents page Mock Up

Planning my Contents page
Here, I have designed the mock up of my contents page. I have used the same colours and font style as my front cover, so that my magazine can be consistent and recognisable by the readers as the school magazine's.

(please click to enlarge)