Media Studies Contents Page Analysis

House Style

The house style of this contents page is minimalist and does not have many images or colours. This relates to the target audience as the club culture mixmag deals with is mainly adult, as clubs don’t accept young people, and adults don’t want their magazine to appear childish, they want it to look professional.

Imagery

The main image of this contents page is of a young woman dancing in a club with deliberate poor quality as a stylistic choice, possibly to create a ‘retro’ feel.

Both Kerrang and mixmag tend to have people dancing on the contents pages however Kerrang tends to show the wild concert culture of rock while mixmag is emulating the cool and trendy approach of club music.

Design Balance

The page is divided into two halves, with the right half reserved for the contents and minor articles whilst the left is based around the main article, giving a brief description and a visual representation. The article on the left is most likely sponsored so it has been given more attention to encourage people to read it. So the money spent on it is not wasted.

Design Symmetry

The contents page is symmetrical, as shown by the red lines. Whilst there is not an even distribution of space it is clear that the sections are symmetrically divided so as to be visually appealing rather than unorganised and messy.

Media Studies Contents Page Analysis

Design Balance

The design balance for Q appears to be more even than mixmag, as there is not a large central image with the contents surrounding it like in mixmag but there is a clear and fairly even divide between the images on top and the contents on the bottom. This shows us that unlike mixmag, Q has equal investment in the quality of all their articles and so wants a potential buyer to read all the articles so the money invested is not wasted.

Imagery

There are more images in Q than there are in mixmag, and almost all of the images in Q are of famous music artists like Florence Welch and Alice Cooper. This contrasts mixmag’s cover which has just two (clearly visible) people. This suggests that mixmag is a lesser known magazine and as such it struggles to get big name artists to feature in it. Also the dance music genre focuses more heavily on the music and less about the DJs and artists that make music. Q takes the opposite approach as it is already a well-established magazine so artists are more willing to be interviewed. The music genre Q focuses on is not set in stone so it tends to be the latest and most successful artists in their genres recently.

Design Symmetry

There is design symmetry with the contents page of Q, as seen by the green dotted line dividing the top half of the page with the bottom half. The top half is dominated by images and their associated articles in the while the bottom half has articles that were not significant enough to have images. This helps people who want to know at a glance whether the magazine is for them by seeing what artists are being discussed straight away without sifting through the entire magazine.

House Style

Q magazines contents are split up over two pages, contrasting mixmag’s design. This has been done to show more summaries of the articles, suggesting that Q magazine has more content than mixmag. This relates to the nature of mixmag’s readers, wanting short summaries of the latest trends whereas readers of Q want more in depth but less frequent content about music.