Studio Brief 3: Layout research

I went into a few different vinyl shops to collect free music magazines/zines/booklets. These are some features I am fond of.

The Fly

The white and black contrast is really effective in these layouts as the page is matte. The simplicity makes it very striking, as well as the contrast between the large type and the body font. The large quote makes the viewer have no choice in reading it, therefore finding out something about the article regardless of whether they want to or not. Using a black background is really vivid to me and it made me realise I am sick of seeing white backgrounds with black text on top.
I'm very fond of the highlighted text; its less like highlighting and more like a prominent feature of the layout. Without that one feature it would be a plain page and it follows the structure of sharp lines and boxes.

Howard Assembly Room

I really like the use of colour in these spreads, it makes the whole booklet very vibrant. They have also taught me that using black or white for the body font is probably the best move when using colour, as a lot of small colourful text doesn't work too great.

I think the use of a photograph for the background of one of the spreads works really well, and it is pretty captivating with the neon colours. Using photographs in the same placing on each opposite page makes the layout overall very neat and easy to navigate.

Vibrations

I really like the simple three colour scheme that is used throughout the zine. Some pages have neon photographs as well as matching body text, which normally I think is quite ugly but the pure simplicity of only having two colours makes this very stylised and successful to me. It makes it stand out against other magazines.

The City Talking

It was interesting to look at this newspaper about music as it is made on a much bigger scale, so I can see how the layout is different from much smaller pages. The two spreads of 40 top albums helps me a lot as I'm doing a similar page based on favourite albums from 20 people, and this newspaper has a very orderly, neat and straightforward way of laying them out.