ENCOUNTERING PROBLEMS WITH THE CONTENTS

When I sat back and looked at the contents page, I felt that it was not right. This is because I felt that the layout did not convey the forms and conventions of the conventions of a regular music magazine. To overcome this problem, I decided to look back at my older posts on the contents page. I realised that I needed to keep it simple in my design and focus less on having boxes for my text. A good example of a contents page is this-

I feel that this example is much stronger than my contents page. The main visible differences that makes it seem more professional/ punk like is the use of fonts and layout. For my contents page, the block colours and the use of white text boxes makes it look almost like a comic strip. I also feel that the red puff is too childish and has no relevance to the punk genre. From looking at my contents page, I feel as if it has the forms and conventions of a pop magazine rather than a punk magazine.

To change this, I have decided to focus on the layout, colours and font as I feel that these are the key components that make this example of a contents page, Punk.



I decided to keep the layout of the top of the magazine as I felt that this accurately conveyed the forms and conventions of the genre.

To start off, I decided to remove the white text box and the red puff. Immediately after removing these, it lost the comic strip look. I then wanted to add text. I decided to use a gold font colour as this stood out from the picture behind and also emphasised the importance of the picture. I decided to use 'Dreamwalker' as the font for the title of the article as compared to the last font, it had greater punk connotations with the bold effect and the distorted text. I also decided that it was appropriate to place the text on a slant to create a sense of informality and to make it interesting to look at. For the information under the article title, I decided that it was a better idea to include it under the title. To make it stand out, I used a white font with a black outline. Instead of having a red puff, I decided to include instead a red stroke of paint. This made the contents look much less overwhelming and accurately conveyed the forms and conventions of the genre due to the fact that it is messy and unique.

I feel that these small changes made the contents page seem much more professional with deeper links to the punk genre.