Contents Page - The Making Of

In this blog post, I am going to take you through how I made my contents page.

Draft

Here is the original draft for my contents page :

From this evidence, my contents page would be quite busy and full of information. As you will see later on in this blog, my contents page changed drastically, with the inclusion of what was meant to the main image on my front cover.

Background

I decided that my contents page would be based on a black background with the text and images jumping out of the page. On this black background would be an image from the draft above, however when I made the front cover, it seemed that it was lacking something, and this meant that the image and general layout of the initial front cover looked more like a contents page, so I incorporated the main image from my draft front cover into the contents page, positioned it on the right wall of the page and this formed the basis for my background :

As you can see, this is the exact mirror image of the front cover draft, and I believe that this was a wise idea to make this my contents page. As with the front cover draft, I decided to write the contents of the magazine on the left hand side.

Text

With these in place, I needed to write the name of my magazine and the word 'Contents' somewhere on the page. This is where I positioned them :

As you will see, the masthead font has changed since the front cover. This is because I re-made my front cover with a different background image which required a different font to that of the contents page. I decided to keep the change of font because I believe that the font works well with the colour design and layout of the contents page.

Dead Space

After the writing was positioned, there was a lot of dead and empty space floating around my contents page. I needed to fill this with something, and from my research into similar media texts, it became clear that other contents pages use pictures from articles featured on their contents page. This gave me an idea, and so I started to take relevant pictures of articles which I came up with for the contents page. Firstly, the competition which advertised the chance to win a guitar. Of course, a guitar was needed, and so I took a photo of a guitar, used the magnetic lassoo tool to cut around it and, with a feathering effect of 10px, placed it on my contents page, with additional text to direct the reader to that page :

Even after this addition, I needed to fill up more blank spaces. There was still area around the picture of Dom leaning on the right wall of the page. This needed to change, and therefore I decided to write information, much like with the guitar, which would direct the reader to the double page spread on Dom Norman :

Another area which needed filling was in the top right hand corner of the page. I decided to fill this up with a picture referring to the festival article, and so I again used the magnetic lassoo tool of a band which I took when at a festival. I moved the image to fill the vacant corner of the contents page :

There was still open space between the picture of Dom and the text, so I needed to fill this up with another image. I noticed with the Kerrang front cover that they had previews of the posters which they were giving away free with the magazine. Because of this, I decided to put in a picture of a poster which would be given away free with my magazine :

It was slightly slanted to a) give it a better fit and b) to make it look more appealing. The white box around it again adds emphasis to the image and therefore more likely to draw the reader's eye towards it.

Overall in my contents page I have created a nice looking layout to the page and have used relevant images and text to add extra information to the page. Without the small details that have occured in the process of my contents page, I think that my contents page would have turned out badly, however I feel that it looks reasonably good and I am pleased with my effort :