A car usually has 4 wheels. It can have 3, but how often do you see a 3 wheeled Lamborghini? Conventions are important - regardless of whether you attend to them or not. It’s like fashion, a shirt can be any colour, it can be any size, and it can have stripes, dots or even naked women on it. But it will most likely have 2 short sleeves and a length enough to cover your stomach.
You can break that convention sure, but your audience comes first. Otherwise you’re creating a product for yourself rather than your target market.
All of the following points are made according to my target audience of mainstream girls 16-24 ONLY. However, most points are a generalisation of the majority of music magazines.
Conventions within mainstream music magazines:
- Information Architecture – This is the idea that everything is ordered according to importance and relevance. Content such as heading titles and the 1st paragraph is placed above over secondary content such as pagination.
- Purpose of object - The size and colour of any piece of content is determined for its purpose. This is different to the idea that when something is bigger it receives more attention. There is no fool-proof formula to decide a hierarchy, as influences are arbitrary.
- Variety - Each page within a magazine usually consists of a ratio of text to images. This ratio is typically similar throughout the entire magazine (Continued in my next point) but fluctuates in correspondence to the page content. For instance DPS on artists are more like to have a higher text ratio compared to a page on fashion.
- Balance – Throughout the magazine there is a current theme in terms of design, shape, layout & colour. This typically follows the magazine title & cover.
My target audience is highly mainstream therefore conventions are religion for the design of my products. Throughout my products I have used a theme of negative space between black and white keeping unnecessary distractions at a minimum. Circles & Strokes are a common feature within my designs. Another trick I have used to display hierarchy is by keeping all secondary texts in a dark grey (black is too brash in my opinion) but any featuring text is at a golden colour; assisted with a careful mixture of sans-serif and serif font choices. It is clear I have kept close to the above conventions.
Conventions – Cover Pages:
- Portrait Orientation - Not only is it easier to hold but this orientation is correlated to information and content, rather than landscape which is associated with a photograph.
- Masthead - Typically comprises of the magazine name taking up full-width along with a tagline either underneath or above. Occasionally the edition of the magazine is alongside the masthead; however there is no generic positioning for this. The masthead is almost always takes up 1/10th to 1/8th of the page, and is positioned at the top. In other genres the masthead would blend with the background image.
- Main Image – A iconic image of an artist being interviewed or a featuring article is the norm for music magazines. Surrounding the image are headlines (usually the most important is centred and made larger than others). The headlines do not obstruct the image.
My magazine’s masthead uses contrast to grab the attention of my audience instead of bright colours which appear childish and naïve. Separated by different banners, the cover appears organised, yet young and stylish. All headlines do not cover up any major points of the photograph but are easily noticed.
Conventions – Contents
- Contents title – Simple enough really.
- Sidebar listing – A listing of each article would run down the side, featured articles are highlighted (according to the magazine’s taste). Underneath or beside this would be the page number in the format ‘Page #’.
- Featured Articles –Taking up most of the page would be a collection of images and large headlines for usually 3-8 articles. Size is correlated to importance.
- Note from the editor – A short paragraph summing up the entire magazine and recent events.
Although my magazine doesn’t cover the last point, there is a sidebar full of all the articles in a common manner alongside a collage of images and headlines in the format of Polaroid photos. I would say this is sufficient.
Conventions – Double Page Spread
- Everything goes – Fortunately for me there are no real conventions for DPS. This is because of the array of different styles. DPS can be for a collection of items combined with a few paragraphs from an editor (which I have followed for my magazine), for an interview of an artist or even a list of top albums; the list is endless.
