Analysing my magazine contents

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My media product, the Contents page of my college magazine, uses the forms and conventions of real media products. This is because several techniques, one of them are the colour used. The colours I’ve used are the same as the ones used on the front cover, making this a consistent magazine (housestyle). Also, I’ve added a gradient orange effect at the corner of this page, matching with the front cover.

Another reason why this contents page fits in the normal conventions of a media product (magazine) is because of the use of fonts. The fonts used for the heading, subheadings and folio is the same font used for the masthead on the front cover. The font comes from DaFont.com and colouring it was a long process which took place in Photoshop. I used the Magnetic Lasso Tool and went around each letter/number, then reversed the selected areas, so that it was then the numbers/letters that were highlighted, then I deleted them, enabling me to be able to fill the space with colour.

With the rest of the text on the page, I used the Text Tool on the InDesign software and simply typed my stories. The stories with the folio numbers by the side allow the reader to easily and conveniently go to the story they’re looking for. This makes the magazine easy to use and more functional.

Another reason why it fits into the ordinary conventions is because of the gridplan and flatplan I created for this contents page. A flatplan and gridplan make the construction of this much easier. This technique enabled me to efficiently add in a skyline, gutters and a border around the edge where no text or image should go in. I also used multi-column layouts to make it look more professional. This way, the text flows better on the page, and I had more options for adding in photos. Through this method, I was also able to put in my flannel panel at the bottom of the page and easily insert images.

From making this contents page, I have learnt about using InDesign. Going from Photoshop to InDesign made it easier, as I already got the basics from making my front cover in Photoshop. However, InDesign was different to using Photoshop. It involved a lot less photo editing, and more about the text, and what actually goes inside of a magazine. I have further developed my understanding of the software from doing this, which is very important for future projects using both InDesign and Photoshop.