Designing a Magazine

Making a Magazine Design

Most magazine genres have a defined look that most of the magazines in the genre follow. To make a magazine that is going to attract your audience you must first catch their eye. Standing out is the first step to setting your magazine apart from the competition. 

Covers

It's important to remember to not clutter your cover with extra colors, images and text. While adding more may seem like a good way to attract attention it is even worse because it makes your cover and by extension your magazine unappealing to the customer. When it comes to cover design, less is more.

Use of color is something you should pay attention to when making your cover. Your cover can look more modern and intriguing if you just use a single splash of color within the main image. By using one color and a mostly mixture of black, white, and grey, the places with the color are brought to the customers' attention and they guide the customer's eyes across the cover. The use of a single splash of color can make your cover more intriguing to the customer. 

Content and Articles

The theme of both your magazine brand as a whole as well as the specific issue is an important thing to keep in mind when making your magazines. As customers come to know your brand it will become increasingly important to stay on brand with each new release. By choosing a single theme for your magazine it allows the magazine to be more established and harmonious. 

Making use of negative space in the layout of your magazine is essential. By using negative space and knowing when not to cluster the page it makes your magazine look more refined. Negative space can also guide you the customer eyes through your article, two-page spread, table of contents, or any other part of the magazine. Negative space is an important tool to guide your customer's eye across the page.

Font choice is imperative in conveying the mood of your magazine. I have covered the meaning behind fonts before so to find which font suits your magazine, check it out. The to summarize the two fonts that are most used Serif and Sans-Serif, serif is useful if you want to seem more regal and refined, sans-serif is nice for a more modern and intellectual look. The fonts of your magazine can subtly convey emotions and personality you want to be associated with your magazine.

Contrast can be a good way to bring the customer's attention to something on the page. By using contrasting elements such as switching up the font for one section or using brighter colors around a subject you can easily tell the viewers where the important things to look at are. Contrast can bring important pieces of content to the viewers' attention.

Video Game Magazine Design

Video game magazine covers typically use cover images with direct eye contact with the customer to engage the audience and make them want to buy the product. Sometimes main images will be looking away from the camera to seem cooler and appeal to the younger audience. Main coverlines typically are in a different font from the other coverlines for the audience to make a distinction between the important coverlines. As I previously stated in the Conventions and Characteristics of Gaming Magazines post the main coverline is usually the name of the game that is the focus of the specific issue, so the font used for the coverline is typically the font used for the title of the game. By doing this, game magazines engage their audience with a connection to the actual games.

Unlike most mainstream magazines, video game magazines tend to shy away from using any wordplay in their coverlines. Often coverlines are simply the title of the game and a short phrase about the article or just a list of video game titles with some sort of descriptor. This is to immediately inform the audience of the array of games that are in the magazine.

The Table of Contents page is usually split into different sections, these sections are the same throughout each issue of the magazine. The sections typically are things such as reviews and first looks as well as things exclusive to each magazine company. The table of contents often includes images of games for the main articles of the issue. This is to engage the audience about the games discussed inside and entice the audience further into buying the magazine.

Two Page Spreads in videogame magazines will typically do a few things, either they disperse images within the article's text, the article will have one page that is an image and one that is the article, or one large image will take up most of one page and part of the other. These different techniques all attract the target audience in the same way, which is by showing the animated and vivid nature of the games and by extension the article and magazine. This technique can also make characters seem larger than life.

Conclusion

The important things to remember are that you should always make sure your magazine stands out from the competition, but don't complicate your layout just to be different. You should keep it simple and make sure your magazine conveys everything you want it to, and it does it well. Video game magazines always want to engage their audience by making their characters stand out and larger than life, and attract customers with a wide array of video game topics.

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