Welcome back to the blog!
Today I wanted to talk about the different types of house styles in magazines. A house style is a standard for magazines to look. Although everybody has different way of creating magazines a house style helps keep the readers gaze on the magazine. All magazines should have a color scheme of at least three colors, a format that can be followed along and target specific audience.
One thing you might notice when looking at a magazine you can identify what company or brand it is. Because the constant use of house styles this makes it easier for people to recognize them and therefore they would be more susceptible to buy it. House styles make a magazine look more professional when you come across it. For example, In this picture to the right I choose Vogue magazines from different countries. I thought that by choosing magazines from different places one can see how alike and memorable their magazines are, anyone across the globe can recognize what Vogue magazines look like even if they never bought one. Although this magazines have similar features, they have differences. Magazines would never talk about the same thing twice which is why people are attracted to them. The constant topics being talked about and its drawing cover we see the constant use of white, black and variations of red. The big mastheading in the top makes Vogue recognizable around the world. It is almost impossible to think of vogue and not think of covers similar to this come to mind.
When creating a magazine one thing you must think about is what colors you are going to use. This should be used throughout the whole magazine. Three colors minimum should be used, if you were to use more than that the magazine wouldn't be as appealing. The constant difference in colors would make the magazine look all over the place and therefore readers wouldn't find it entertaining. Using different colors caused a constant change that would not make a magazine look professional and no one would go out of their way to buy a magazine that doesn't look well put together. Using three colors would allow the readers to follow along more easily.
Everything put into a magazine has to be done with a purpose. Using a format allows us to follow along with our eyes important or eye catching things with our eyes. A magazine should have a masthead, lead article, main image, issue and dateline, and supporting cover lines. Where the masthead goes is very important as it has the title of the magazine and this is where the readers would recognize it. The different supporting cover lines put across the magazine also have a purpose as it shows the different topics in a magazine. The main image gives the readers an insight as to what kinds of topics they are going to be talked about. For example, putting the picture of a celebrity gives the idea that they are going to talk about different things happening around celebrity like their films or music. And if the magazine had a picture of an animal you’ll know that it’s going to talk about anything dealing with the environment and nature.
Having a specific audience you’re targeting is crucial to a magazine. Knowing exactly who you are talking to helps you understand what kind of information you want them to see. The language used also is part of understanding your audience. For example, when talking to a young audience you particularly don’t want to include words that they might now understand, you have to use a language that can cause them to keep reading. If it’s adults then you know speaking to them with more knowledge would make them follow along. Another example is how contrasting women and men magazines are. Women magazine mostly talk about fashion, relationships, cooking, women health and celebrities. And men magazines usually talk about sports, cars, and money. Although some magazines try to make any topic neutral it’s still very obvious that women and men magazines have mostly stayed in the same topics since they first began. Now for more general audience there’s magazine fully based on psychology, sciences or the environment it’s usually mostly targeted to one type of individual who genuinely know about the topic or are interested to learn about it. So in this case this are more neutral base targeted.
In the next blog I’ll analyze the house style of a different magazines, see you in the next blog!
Credits:
Cover and images created /edited in Canva.com
- https://dfwshuckle.wixsite.com/as-media/house-style
- https://www.theeword.co.uk/blog/creating-a-house-style-for-your-content-why-how/
- https://www.thoughtco.com/house-style-editing-1690842
First picture magazines used from:
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