Doing: Contents Page

The above is the final design for my contents page. It involves a single image, to accompany the feature article, a leafy background which links to the double page spread and the page listing. The main issue I had with this layout is the leafy background, which I created using a stamping tool on photoshop as I didn't want them to be too prominent as they only linked to the double page spread and the artist. I used the opacity tool on InDesign to create it as a subtle background, which is commonly seen in professional contents pages (keeping to the conventions.)

When listing the pages I often forgot that I was working with an A4 sheet and that, with my original spacing, I was crowding the page and making it cluttered. I spaced the headings of the page (Featured Articles, The Usual Suspects, Extras) and coloured them red to indicate their importance and draw attention to them. In order to break up the group text, listing the pages and page numbers, I experimented with the colour. Red and black didn't look right for the singer/song writer feel that the magazine had so I tried black and white, with extremely pleasing results. In order to break it up from the leafy background, I placed an opaque grey background underneath it, which also allowed the text to break away from the main image of the page.

To keep to the conventions I created a strap line, in the house style of the magazine. I found it difficult to bring up different points in the strap line that hadn't been previously mentioned in the page listing. I looked for inspiration online and found that they often mentioned competitions and the previous winners from those competitions. I think this was a good idea and I made the text white with a black line, allowing it to stand out from the red background. 

In this image you can also see part of the house style and layout of having the mast head of the magazine repeated in the lower corner of the right page, I plan on repeating this in my double page spread.

In the top corner of the page you can see a red number '3' indicating the page number, this part of the house style and layout will be repeated in the double page spread. When looking for a text for the page number, I looked to ones I had already used. As I knew the conventions were that only a limited amount of different fonts were used, I wanted to keep to them and I ended up using the same one I used for my mast head.

The main, long image at the side of the page, creates a framing effect and slightly breaks the conventions of a contents page as most contents pages include a large amount of images and next text boxes. As I have used more text and only one image I have to keep in mind the number of photographs used in the double page spread. This main image was inspired by a photo shoot that Cheryl Cole did for Q magazine, where only one main image was presented on the contents page.