For my compare and contrast, I chose the two magazines I thought were most unique and interesting. The grunge, metallic look of the rock magazine is a stark counter to the clean, futuristic look of the Billboard magazine, which I thought would make for interesting writing.

Colour: The two magazines have starkly different colour schemes, with a metallic brown for the rock magazine, and a light blue future look for the rock magazine. This can almost establish the age demographic of each magazine, as older people would be attracted to the washed out colours of the rock magazine, whilst the billboard magazine has bright, multi coloured aspects which would attract younger people with the bright colours.

The rock magazine has a much busier layout than the billboard magazine, the billboard magazine is clean in that it only has 1 headline, with a few pieces of text scattered through out, whilst the rock magazine has story headlines, each with a sentence of accompanying text. The ‘METALLICA’ of the rock magazine also takes up more room than the ‘reimagined dragons’ of the billboard magazine, contributing to the bush lookI particularly like the clean look of the billboard magazine, as I find that a design that has too much information at once can be unappealing to look at, in a word tiring.

For the contents page analysis , again I chose 2 designs which I thought were the most different. Whilst the magazine on the right(referred to as Q) uses the left 1/3 of the page for it’s actual page numbers the rest assigned to picture, the Kerrang magazine uses the bottom half for the page numbers and then the top half for a picture. I think that the Kerrang method is better as it allows more freedom in the picture type, however I do like the clean nature of the Q magazine when compared to Kerrang. Kerrang makes a wider use of different font colours, typefaces and sizes than the Q magazine, an effect which I dislike a large amount. I like the clean nature of the Q magazine, with the same 2 fonts used for the majority of the contents page, with other fonts used only on the main feature and headlines. In contrast, the Kerrang contents page uses some fonts only once before discarding them, which creates a dis-coherent look in my opinion.

Both magazines use a page number style where there is a large, single picture with nothing more than a page number, which is a common trait between each magazine, although I do not know why this happens.The Q colour scheme is more consistent, with reds and whites being common where there are no pictures, Kerrang is more sporadic with many clashing colours throughout

In these two features, the camera shots are almost entirely different, the right magazine features the standard ‘mid shot ½, whilst the magazine on the left uses an intertwined text and picture format. I like the format of left spread more, as it is more visuallt interesting, utilizing all of the page rather than ½ in a blocky and uninteresting manner.

The spread on the left is less of an article than the spread on the right, indicated by the fact that the spread on the right has both a smaller font more space devoted to text. The headlines of each also indicates that their subject matters are quite varied.

Each spread actually has a similar colour scheme, grey background with sparingly used purple text, and then white & black text for the remainder. This shows me that a 3 –colour scheme with 1 bright and 2 monochrome colours may be a n interesting colour scheme.