Double Page Spread Research

Now that my front cover and contents page have been made, I can now start my double page spread. Before I do anything I want to gain a good perspective of what I am working towards. To start, I have created a mood board featuring many double page spreads from different rock magazine, just to gain some ideas and get familiar with the conventions of them. Here it is:

When looking at all of these I noticed some conventions in general, and some that are signature to a certain magazine:

- Kerrang!: Mainly uses dark backgrounds, with either sepia or monotone images of the band/artist. They are usually posing for the picture, but some are just natural shots of the musicians at work. Tend to include one big main image with a strip of smaller images of the same artist. Text is fairly small and does not distract. Headings are usually punchy and stand out a lot, they have the same rugged text as the Kerrang! logo. Colour scheme is usually red, black and white like the house colours of the magazine.

- NME: Tends to follow a house colour scheme in that certain section of the magazine: blue, black and white. The headings are rarely the name of the band, but either quote from them or something that relates to them. The text is usually in neat columns, but still a very small part of the page. Main image is usually posed and takes up either half the page or more.

- Q: This seems to be a very regimented house style for double page spreads. They barely vary and seem to be quite simplistic compared to other magazines. This could be due to the older audience. They have a plain white background with a large black and white image of the artist on one page. On the other page there are 3 columns of text, with a large red letter in the background that is the initial of the artist.

- Rock Sound: These double page spreads seem to be very bold. They feature large images of the artist, either in colour or black and white. The heading is usually the name of the band and very large and bold in capitals. There is also minimal text that does not seem to stand out a lot. Again, the heading and the image are the main focuses.