Textual Analysis For Music Magazine Contents Page

This is a contents page created by a music magazine “Vibe”, the main image of the content page is a celebrity by the name of “Amber Rose”, who is known through affiliating with another famous celebrity, “Kanye West”, who is a well-known artist in the hip-hop industry. By taking genre-related pictures, this should help me attract the correct type of target audience I desire. The “Vibe magazine contents page has started off with a low key lighting image with a spotlight going over her face, this may have been done to enhance the awareness of the famous celeb.  Also, the rest of the image is darker, which makes it easier to recognise the famous celeb. The costume that Amber Rose is wearing connotes wealth, as the fur coat and necklace/medallion she is wearing represents a lot of money since they must have cost a lot to purchase.

The top left corner had the magazine logo placed there, along with the website name for the magazine. The layout of the magazine makes viewers focus more on the celebrity, rather than the actual contents. The contents are in small san-serif fonts and take up about 1/3 of the entire page, which are aligned on the left-hand side of the page in white font. The first heading on the page reads “Departments”, which declares the other sections in the magazine, which are listed underneath it. The “Departments” heading is in a larger bold, white font compared to the rest of the page, this shows its purpose as the heading for the rest of the context below.

  

The purpose of this layout is to capture the audience’s attention with the image of a famous celebrity (Amber Rose). The light font on a dark background has made the reader’s job easier, as the font can be read clearly. The small images next to the sub-headings are colour-coordinated with the page numbers, this colour scheme helps to add some sort of colour to the dull image. This magazine has approximately 120 pages in this issue. Underneath the sub-headings is information about the page with the names of celebrities that are very famous, strangely enough the fonts are not in a bold font, which makes this hard for the readers to notice the full content of the magazine.

In conclusion, the content page can be improved by creating actual awareness of the content by increasing the size of the content information or having the text bold. The layout of the magazine is very efficient for attracting reader’s attention to the image. The image of Amber Rose helps me to widen the variety of the type of people that I can put on a music magazine, where it’s not just the artists, but some people who are affiliated with the music artists of that genre i.e. hip-hop. Also it was noticeable that there was only one picture on the content page, an increase of images of different music artists and associated can also be advised for improvement.