Analysis of Contents Page: Mojo Issue 84

Analysis of Contents Page: Mojo Issue 84

 

Contents Pages are a crucial part of magazines as they give the reader a guide to the articles they may be interested in viewing, saving them a lot of time and generally shaving what could  be a tiresome edge off of the media format of the magazine. Music magazines are no exception to this rule, and the contents page I will be analysing is pretty comprehensive in terms of the motifs that often accompany what a contents page in a music magazine should look like.

The contents page is minimalistic to say the least,  a single white strip with the magazine’s title block (their logo for all intents and purposes), the issue and the month and date it was released. Below this we have the actual listing of the articles included and then obviously their page numbers. The reason for the simplicity is simple, the contents page is designed for practicality, not to look particularly impressive. The magazine editors don’t want you to admire the contents page, they want you to use the contents page pretty much purely as a way to navigate through the articles they have put a lot of work and money into creating most likely; as long as the page looks neat, there’s no real issue. This approach seems conclusive with the one that most music magazines adopt.

The title block is included at the top of the page really as a way to brand another page of the magazine with the magazine’s logo. This is done because they want to keep the reader making links between the music they like reading about and the magazine in which they are reading it. Mojo wouldn’t make as much money if they didn’t use this tactic to suggest the links to their audience between the music they brought the magazine for and the magazine’s identity.

The contents page spans across two pages in Mojo, one half is just text, but the rest are a selection of pictures carefully arranged across the page. The pictures are of the bands that are in the issue, with an appropriate caption informing the reader of who they are and the page number they are mentioned on underneath each shot. This is done as a way to break up the mundane process of solely relying on the big block of text in the far left as your only way to navigate through the magazine; this method suggests a more dynamic and a slicker approach, and by extension that makes Mojo seem both slick and dynamic. Once again they are using this to promote a positive image of themselves within their audience.

The colour scheme is mainly black and white, with the colour pictures of the bands and the red boxes the captions are sealed in being used to break up the monotony of the monotone base. Red is a bold colour, it suggests many things to many different people, but the one I think Mojo were going for here is passion. They are passionate about music, they want the reader to know they are passionate about music, so using this colour as a way to break up the colour scheme is very good because on top of helping to create a contents page that looks aesthetically pleasing, they also use the connotations of red to push their identity onto the reader even more.

The main purpose of the contents page, as I’ve stated already, is as a tool to use in order to navigate through the magazine, what we see here is that Mojo have also seen it as a tool to subtly push their identity to the reader via the subtle connotations of their use of colour and even something as simple as including their title block at the top of the page.