Dairy Entry Week 3: Analysing 5 Front Covers, 5 Contents Pages and 5 Double Page Spreads

Throughout this week I was focusing on analysing 5 front covers, 5 contents pages and 5 double page spreads linking to my genre of music which was indie pop. While working through the front covers (Monday 22nd February) I realised I was heading towards a more NME and Q based magazine; while looking at the layouts and the colour schemes. On Tuesday 23rd February I was still looking at my front cover analysis's but looked at Rolling Stone; which was too basic for my style. And Mojo which looked at the more retro and older artists. Both of these where probably not the best for linking my music magazine to as they didn't show enough of the same characteristics I wanted to pursue in my own magazine.
On Wednesday 24th February I looked/analysed all of my contents pages while looking at the layout, colour schemes and photos. While analysing the contents pages I found that I really liked the way Rolling Stone decided to layout each area of the contents page; they did this by keeping the page headings simplistic and not over crowding the page with images. On the other hand NME looked a little more childish with the layouts, by using bold fonts and too many colours which made the page look to manic.
Finally on the final 2 days (Thursday 25th and Friday 26th February) I analysed my double page spreads focusing on Mojo, NME, Q and Rolling Stone. All of these DPS had great images to compliment the artist being interviewed, but the one that stood out for me was The Wombats NME double page spread and Q with the Lady Gaga interview. Both of these magazines used the 3 columns which was most effective and had the most eye catching images to promote the artists. While analysing them both I realised that by using a range of font styles e.g serif and sans-serif your magazine will look a lot more professional and high skilled.
While analysing all these magazines it gave me a great understanding of what the reader wants to see and how they would prefer it to be laid out. Furthermore these analysis's gave me a great in depth look at what colour work and which ones don't, this will now allow me to come up with a good simple colour scheme to make the readers eyes drawn to my magazine.