Production Diary 9 - Creating the layout of the contents page and contents text

5th November 2013

This week we started to create the layout of the contents page, double page spread and front cover of our magazine. We did some sketches of the layouts on paper first so we had an idea of what to do when we do it on In Design.

Before we started the task we were given a brief demonstration of how to create it by our teacher. We learnt some shortcuts which would be useful for us to know and these included changing size of things (Ctrl+Shift+>or<), copying something (Alt+drag), toggling layout (w) and selecting everything (Ctrl+A). We also got taught how to make fixed styles for certain text (e.g. title, subheading etc.) by using the paragraph styles section.

We first set up the page and set the settings to 7 pages and 3 columns. After that we started to create the layout of the pages by using text boxes and black boxes. The black boxes we drew represented the images we plan to put in later on. As for the text, we put in place holder text -which was random text that helps you get an idea of what it would look like when you put your actual text in -as we haven’t written the article or contents list yet.

To make the layout of my contents page I found a very good example from Total Film magazine. Although it is not a music magazine but the layout of the contents page is very good and so I decided to make mine similar to that because I believe it is quite successful. I did a similar layout by having images and text in a similar position.

We used the fonts we downloaded before to experiment with, for the masthead, headings subheadings and text. This would help us in making the real magazine as we can experiment with the different fonts for each thing and choose the most suitable one. I decided to have only a couple of different fonts so that there is consistency within my magazine to make it look professional.

For homework, I did the contents text which was the list of contents for the contents page. I made 2 different sections for it: on the cover, features and regulars. For each of these categories I wrote about 6-8 different ideas. I also included an artist index which had the names of different artists and the page number they are featured on. Finally I wrote a couple of lines in a subscription box I made.