Tuesday, 16 October 2012

My Analysis For A Pop Magazine Contents page


 
For my analysis, I have decided to look at the contents page of a ‘Top of the pops’ magazine. This will help me understand the codes and conventions of a contents page which will help me, when I start to create my own.
The first thing I notice about a contents page is that they always have some text at the top of the page, giving the page a heading. In this magazine it says ‘inside the mag…’ this just gives the page a subject telling the reader what’s on that page.  

If we didn’t have a contents page in our magazines, we would have to flick through every page before we find what we was looking for. That’s why one of the main conventions of a contents page is the page topics and numbers. These are both very important because they help the reader find what they want to read about without looking through the whole magazine.

What’s different about this contents page is that instead of listing all the page topics it has got an image of the front cover on. This has arrows pointing to each topic on the cover with page numbers at the end so that they can see what page numbers the main stories are. Notice how the page topics are all in different categories, this helps split up the stories so that the readers can search for what they want to read about, without having to read each topic.  

Just like any page in the magazine this contents page keeps to the target audience with its house colours. Because the target audience is teen girls the colours pink and white really work together, they also help the colour of the text (black) easy to read and stand out.  

Another important convention of a contents page is pictures. Most of the time the contents page will have a selection of images which relate to some of the stories, this makes the page topic more recognisable to the reader. For example if one page topic says free poster of ‘One Direction’ then there might be a small image of that poster on the page which draws the reader in. An example on this magazine would be the small pictures of ‘one direction’ and some ‘accessories’ so that the reader has more knowledge about what’s on that page.

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