Initial Planning; Contents

This is my Contents Page for my Metal Magazine.

When planning my Contents page, the first thing that I realised was that 2 out of my 3 influential magazines had only one A4-sized Contents page. This made it easier to view the different articles, and decided that I would use only one A4 page also. The Q magazine however, did use a double page for the Contents, and the majority of this space is images. However, it made it slightly more complicated to view what page specific articles were on, and this is why I am going to avoid this, as I believe a simple to understand Contents page is needed within a magazine.

I also realised that all three magazines I analysed use plenty of images on the page(s). I believe that this is effective as it means that the main sells of the magazine are simple to find.

When planning my Contents page, I also took into consideration the layout of Kerrang! and Metal Hammer magazines, and the layout which they used. For example, the Kerrang! Magazine uses a large image of the main article review (Five Finger Death Punch) across the top half of the Contents Page. The other contents are categorized into examples of Feedback, News, Swag (Freebies), Live Reviews, Features, Gig Guide and K! Quiz. I liked this idea as the main review is simple to find within the magazine, and the large image of this band across the top half of the page breaks up the page so it is not all writing. I used this within my Contents Page to break up the page and to add some colour on to the page.

Also, in regards to the contents on my Contents Page, I liked Metal Hammer's idea of splitting up the contents into Regulars and Features. I used this idea within my Contents Page also, to seperate the contents so that the audience would know which articles are featured especially, and which ones are printed weekly/fortnightly/monthly, along with the magazine.

I also included an 'Editor's Column' within my Contents Page, I did this because I noticed that all three of my influential magazines did this also, even if only two printed this on the Contents Page. Both, the Kerrang! Magazine and the Metal Hammer place these columns next to the contents of the magazine, therefore; I placed mine here also. When I am further into the production of my Contents Page, I will do further research into Editors Columns from Metal genred magazines.

Throughout my Contents Page, I have also kept the colour scheme of Black, White, Red and Yellow. I did this to keep my magazine simple and to prevent it from becoming intimidating to the audience, and also keeping the violent connotations (of both, the images I will use, and the Red/White/Black colour scheme).