Contents Page

As you can see from the two contents pages above, they are similar in the conventions that they have used. Both have a larger picture in the top right hand corner, possibly to show what the main focus story is. As well as this, they appear to use a unified coloured shceme so as the page does not look too busy and over the top. If more and more colours were used on the page, then it would be likely that the page would look a mess and you would not want to read it. The colours would have been selected so as to coincide with the colour scheme on the front cover which is what I hope to achieve. The last notable thing between the two pages is that all of the written information is down the left hand side. Nearly every contents page in the magazine industry does this. It is so the audience can recognise that the page they are on is a contents page and also so that the information is layed out clearly for the reader to follow.

The first stage for the contents page was to start with a blank white page. Most pages are split in to thirds in magazines so I had to be careful not to make fonts too big. In order to stick to this convention, I decided to split the page up using different lines and bars. The lines were created with the rectangular marquee tool. I made very thin boxes and filled them with the same colour as the front cover title. I then placed each bar individually so as to give me a rough guideline of how much writing I wanted and how big to have the text. As well as this, I added another two black bars to the page as I wanted to continue the pattern from the front page.

The next thing to do was to add the word 'contents' and the picture. The word contents was produced on three different layers so as to achieve the stacked effect. I chose to show the word like this so as not to simply have the word 'contents' written in a line as this would become boring and too cliche. At the end of the contents, I put the word 'sound' in smaller letters to the contents so as to keep the house style of the magazine. I wanted to make this style of magazine mine so 'professionally' added the name of my magazine there as some other magazines do. The picture that you can see at this stage of the production took some editing.


The original picture is here on the left. As you can see, the model is wearing glasses and these reflected the flash. In order to remove the flash, I watched a number of videos on YouTube such as this. The video was not that helpful for what I needed to do and after some thought I managed to crack how to remove the flash from the glasses. First I tried finding another image of the same model without flash and cut the glasses out and placed them over the image with the flash, but the skin tones were different so it did not look natural. Then I zoomed in to the eye and used the eye dropper tool (on the right) to grab the colour of the skin of the model. Once I had this, I coloured over the flash in the glasses to make it look like his eye, and re-drew over the glasses frame in black using a small paint brush. Because one eye was completely covered in flash, I used the clone stamp tool to paint another eye. To do this, I made the clone stamp the same size as the eye that had no flash, held down the ALT key and clicked. This meant that I could now paint somewhere on the screen and where I clicked would start to re-draw. I stared drawing over the opposite eye and the eye was mirrored over the other side thus removing the flash. As well as this, you can see a great deal of graffiti on the wall (left) beside the model. to get rid of this I made a duplicate layer of the picture. I used the colour picker tool to take the colour of the bricks and painted over the marks to cover them. Then, because you could see where I had painted, I changed the opacity of the paint that I had just used to 67% and the paint blended in with the wall removing the main graffiti that was there. On a new layer, I then drew a text box and typed 'Nick Woods' and used a font called Graffiti. Then, I made the text a dark grey colour and angled it so as it was at the same angle as the wall and also changed the opacity of it so as thought it looked like it had been sprayed on to the wall.

The following stage of the design was to add the text in. Initially I added all of the cover stories and put them under a heading of 'cover stories'. This was done to show the reader where to find what stories were on the front of the magazine. I used the same mixture of colours for the text that I used on the front cover to achieve the unified house style. I also included a 'Regulars' section as every magazine has a section that publishes certain things every week/edition without fail. I also included a competition for the readers as many magazines in the business today do this in order to achieve a higher circulation and readership.

The next part of the construction was to add more pictures and text. I chose to add a 'Next Edition' section so as to show the reader what to expect when they buy it again. I out the word WIN in capital letters in order to draw the readers attention to it. When you see the word win, you automatically want to know what is up for grabs and how to enter so I did this to encourage my reader to continue reading the magazine.

This is the final draft of the contents page that I am going to be submitting. To finish it off and add that extra bit of authenticity, I included details of the editor, cover model, photographer and edition of the magazine in the bottom left hand corner. You would be able to tell that this page leads on from my front cover due to the recurring colour theme and consistent fonts used throughout.