Research Task Five: Style Magazine Contents Page Analysis

 Research Task Five: Style Magazine Contents Page Analysis

What is a Magazine Contents Page?

A magazine contents page serves as a way for readers to navigate their way through the content of the magazine more easily, organising content into categories, each story with its allocated page number. The contents page means that all the stories that the magazine covers can be found quickly and easily by the reader., rather than them having to flick through the whole issue.

How do Magazine Contents Pages Use Specific Codes and Conventions?

A magazine uses a wide range of different codes and conventions, not in order to help the reader navigate through the magazine as quickly and easily as possible, but to also act as a representative for the identity of the magazine, and the articles within it. Certain codes and conventions used to do this include visual components, such as the colour scheme and use of images, structural components, such as the visual hierarchy, and text elements, such as the titles of the articles within the magazine.

Firstly, the visual components of the the codes and conventions of a magazine contents page help to give the different articles on the contents page their own aesthetics, helping different audiences locate articles more relevant to them much more easily. For example, the use of images on the contents page of the magazine helps with this, as these smaller images stand out on the contents page, and are also incredibly easy to get information from, compared to the large proportions of type which tends to inhabit the rest of the page. As a result, this is the first thing that the reader looks to for information within the contents page, and so the images help them to narrow down the number of articles that may interest them to a small segment almost instantly, which helps them to find an article/articles within the magazine that interest them far easier. Furthermore, the use of colour on the contents page of a magazine can be used in two ways. One of these ways is creating a single generic colour scheme, covering the entire page, helping to differ the contents page of the magazine from the articles within it, so that the page can be found easily, helping readers to navigate through the issue more easily. This use of colour is more suited to magazines with a more specific focus. Alternatively, for magazines covering a wider focus, the contents page may be needed to categorise the different genres of the articles in the magazine, and using different colour schemes is one of the most recognisable, and therefore one of the most effective, ways of doing this.

Secondly, the structural components of the codes and conventions of a magazine contents page help to show the significance that different articles hold within the issue, which is decided by how much attention they are expected to receive, a judgement that is often represented by elements within the front cover of the magazine. One way this is done is through the visual hierarchy of the contents page. This involves controlling how much exposure different articles are given, through elements such as font size and image size. For example, an article connoted in the main coverline and connoted by the main image of the magazine, is likely to be shown in the largest font and using the largest photos, when compared to how other articles are shown. As a result, this means that the expectedly large proportion of readers that are interested by this main article can find it easily, and, at the same time, the minority of readers which are uninterested by this article can be made aware of its position in the issue, and so are able to find alternative, and perhaps more interesting articles, much more easily.

Finally, the text elements of the codes and conventions of a magazine contents page help to clearly and concisely navigate the reader throughout the issue as quickly as possible, contributing more to the practicality and functionality of the contents page, rather than its more creative elements. One way in which this is done is through one of the most crucial pieces of type on the entire contents page - the titles of the articles. These are often short and concise, helping to deliver the focus of the article to the reader efficiently and effectively, rather than using lengthier titles, which take longer to read, and therefore mean that the reader is not informed of the articles as quickly, and is therefore unable to locate them as efficiently.