Analysis of a contents page

Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition . (Wikipedia) It is one of the most well-known fashion magazines nationally and regionally.

The overall look of the contents page is simplistic and stylish clearly aiming the magazine at upmarket women. Vogue tries to stay away from the ‘busy’ look, too keep the magazine looking like a sensible, highly valued publishing.

The masthead is a main feature of this contents page, covering some of the image, showing it’s importance. The masthead covers some of the girls face; this makes us feel that the model is not important compared to the idea of fashion and the well established and well known brand ‘vogue’. The focus of the contents page is the the main image which is striking and the bold red of the model’s dress stands out and contrasts against the simple, dull background. The colour red is a bold statement as to what feel the magazine is trying to create. The colour red is the warmest of all colours and brings connotations of power, sex and lust. There is no text covering the womans dress, stressing the importance of the fashion.

‘Subscribe to vogue’ and ‘Cover stories’ are in a larger font to the rest of the text on the magazine. This is to show the importance of these cover lines in contrast to the rest of the text. This is so that people can easily navigate through the magazine for something in particular.

The vogue magazine will usually stick to the same layout and conventions of their contents page for all of their magazines; this is to save wasting time redesigning. They will change the main image in each different issue, yet they try to create the same feel of sophisticated, classy lifestyle reading. Several different fonts are used to create a variety, and to look stylish. The text is fairly small; this gives an impression of a fairly complex read, making the target audience seem well educated.

In the bottom right, they offer a free gift when you subscribe to the magazine. This is to attract first time buyers to carry on purchasing the magazine, also it guaranteeing that the magazine will sell the next month. The publishers presume that once people sign up, they are less likely to bother unsubscribing, making it extremely important to lure people in with free gifts.