The Contents of My Table of Contents

Okay, so I started laying out my table of contents and I am pretty satisfied at the product so far. I took inspiration from the first example listed in my previous post, where the orientation of the layout was flipped sideways. As I said before, I like this design choice because it shows that my magazine doesn't take itself too seriously and is not afraid to bend genre conventions a bit. It shows a sort of quirkiness that proves my publication is not like the others.

Furthermore, in my beginning design, I stayed true to my word and made it mainly text-based. Something about the text-based table of contents just looks cleaner to me. When you add the extra elements of photos and captions, it looks all too cluttered and cramped and not professional at all. At least when I tried it, the photos didn't fit with the text and it looked as if they were just randomly placed there. It didn't look good with my design at all and so for now, I favor the look of the contents without any photos at all.

Here's the look of what I have so far: 

As you can see, I only flipped the numbers of the pages sideways because if everything was sideways, it would be incredibly difficult to read. I utilized the same font, David Elika, for the title of this spread but actually used another, called Mighty Brush, for the numbers and the blurbs about each article. The two fonts actually go very well together and look as if they were created in the same font family, which I appreciate because it adds a sense of cohesiveness to the spread even if every font isn't the same. I also like the slightly rugged look created by these fonts that continue the sense that my magazine is bold and daring. 

Because of the certain harshness of the fonts, I tried to counteract their ruggedness with the pink plate in the background of the spread. The color is in the pink family to express a tone of femininity and to tone down the harshness of the font, but the darker shade also expresses that while the spread is slightly feminine it is not girly or prissy. The darker shade fits the mood of the font better and again expresses the feeling of cohesiveness. 

As for the blurbs of mock articles that could hypothetically be found in my magazine, I wanted to not brush these off as unimportant. I made sure to think of article topics that I would actually be interested in writing, and that my audience would actually be interested in reading. My target audience is 18-25-year-olds who have a love for fashion, no matter their gender. However, this article by Greg Allard reports that in 2015 the top-selling fashion magazines are Cosmopolitan and Glamour. Both of these publications have target audiences of women, suggesting that of fashion magazine readers, females are more prevalent than males. Thus, when crafting my article blurbs, I wasn't inclined to shy away from subject matters that may interest women rather than men, like getting ready quickly. Still, all of my article topics are fundamentally gender-neutral since everyone experiences the rush of getting ready quickly or the struggle between wanting to buy designer items but being on a budget. So, I think my article snippets to a good job at attracting all sides of my target audience, especially the one about taking good outfit-of-the-day pics, an internet phenomenon that my target audience is familiar with. By appealing to social media tips, I am appealing to a big part of my target audience's lives which will convince them to read more. 

One thing that is concerning about this beginning spread is the amount of empty space. I was all for being text-based, but at the same time, I don't want my table of contents to look empty. Perhaps a picture would fill up some of this space and make it look a little more complete. With this in mind, I think I'm going to go back to the drawing board and try to integrate some techniques from the other example listed in my previous post.