Contents page research development

 This is my contents page development.

These are some images of examples of contents page based on my genre (sports, basketball magazines)

REFLECTION:

This is the second worst thing that I have to deal with out of the whole 3 projects that I have to do, this is as usual, due to my bad sense of creativity and design, I always had to ask my friends or my teacher for help. Every time I present my friends with a new design, most likely they would dismiss it. Another thing that makes this an absolute pain is I already worked hard enough on one design just to find out its just not it. So I had to change to another picture and another inspiration last minute on deadline week in order to somehow try to boost my grades up. I have learned to read magazines more frequently next time and try to fit in atleast 30 minutes of time every day on the next media project (I hope there is no more).

These are some contents page ideas that i sketched manually 

Slam

Out of all the screenshots I took from the internet, I have took one thing, and that is the fact that contents pages in sports magazines, particularly basketball magazines, have a tendency to show more of the athlete in question in the magazine, with smaller words but still visible to point out the main points that are being shown.

Here, I started with a picture, and experimented a font called Shrikhand, it does not look good at all in my opinion as the words are not quite visible due to the backround.

So I decided to revert to a blue colour on the font, which was a very stupid idea, as it made everything darker and the background was pretty much dark as well. Making the words not visible.

I asked my teacher how he felt about the presentation of this contents page alongside its themes and topics, in order to make the words clear, he gave me a suggestion to cover a part of the page with a shape of any colour in order to make the words visible.

Here on this picture on top, I changed the heading's font, into a more casual nature, while making my shape yellow, and making my words white in order to just test out which type of colours.

On this picture on top, I have asked for opinions from my friends, they adviced me to change the opacity of the coloured shape that covers my words, I think it looks better as the bright colour of yellow does not outshine the words. I also made the font Racing Sans in order to match the sporty vibe.

On this picture on top, One of my friends also suggested for me to play around with the gradient of the coloured shape, here, it makes the magazine look way more casual. 

EMERGENCY ADJUSTMENT

I think it kind of looks better than the previous ones, but something was still off. In my research, the ESPN magazine (2nd picture) uses small words as a short description on the articles. I also wanted to follow the convention of the cover athlete in the middle of the contents page.

So I decided to revert to this photo:

I used this photo as I am in the middle of the frame, I also used my knowledge of adding shapes in the sides of the picture as spaces to add the contents.

So now I would make this picture on top the main inspiration of my contents page. I like the simple and minimalistic nature of this contents page as it looks modern in which the younger generation likes (target audience in terms of age). The colour scheme would also be neat and simple, easy to look at and not complicated at all.

SECOND ATTEMPT WITH DIFFERENT PICTURE

In this second attempt, I started to follow the conventions of the role magazine that I just embedded on top, I put a heading and subheading, with the number of pages not being bolded, instead, I bolded the subheading, this is in order to conform with my inspiration, this was all over the place though, As the borders was aligning with nothing and it was all over the place.

On the screenshot on top, I decided to change to racing sans, but no matter how much I play around with the distance of the lines, It always comes off border or its either looks pretty off to me.

So on this screenshot on top, I reverted back to the font TT autonomous in order to keep the modern look.

Here, I just made my second subheading, a bit bigger, now its all done.

******CHANGE OF PLANS****

Same like the double page spread, I did not really feel good about my contents page after declaring it done, after some hours of consideration, I have decided to change my design as a whole in order to make it look good. 

Here, I decided to move my picture to the side, and add a large yellow box in the left side of the magazine, so far, I am liking the idea on how this would look, it is going to look very simple, it would conform also to the standards of my target audience, it looks way more minimalistic and neater, which aligns with the taste of teenagers nowadays.

Here I am experimenting with some combinations of big numbers, subheadings and letters, I have decided to bold the typeface Aileron as my subheading and make the typeface Norwester as my big number font, also bolding it. Bolding is connotated with masculinity, which is ideal to use in a spirts magazine regardless if it is a cover page, contents page or double page spread.

Here, I am playing around with my word placement and how to arrange it, I am doing this in order to create some unique modern design on this sports magazine in order to attract the eyes of my young audience.

This would be the final product, it certainly looks more like a magazine, more neater and better than the last one, I feel very good about this. This is good to go.