ANALYZING A TABLE OF CONTENT

 Hey blog!

    In todays blog I’m going to breakdown a table of contents. This page comes from the magazine “Teen Vogue” from the issue September 2011. To the right you can see that I have labeled everything I knew a table of magazines should have. To label it I have used everything I learned while doing my research.

    First let’s look at the things at the top. We see the masthead, the date and the cover story page number. Like I previously mentioned the mastheads tells us, the reader, whose magazines this is. We known it’s Teen Vogue. It’s writing in its usual font and color. To empathize that they want people to recognize the brand. It also makes the readers connect that this is also a part of Vogue magazines. As “teen” is written in a different font and “Vogue” is written in the font that Vogue uses across all their magazines. Also we see the date which we know around which time this magazine came out. This is written in smaller text which is not very important yet it’s informative to the reader. Not much can be said about a date other than that’s it’s just used to keep track of the magazine as they come out. Now we see a page number being basically highlighted by a red background and important to mention that it also has a red heart around. First let’s talk about the red background of it. It’s clearly very important to not only be separated from where the page numbers are so we can connect that this is the cover story. It also has a heart around it which definitely means something important to the reader or the writers. 

    But before we dig a little deeper into the hearts, let’s talk about the middle. We see headings, the tittle, and a big image the almost covers the whole page. The headings are bolded making them stand out to our eyes. Usually when we something bolded we tend to read that first which is why it’s so important to be clear and entertaining. This headings have to be like this so that our audience is always engaged, we don’t want to bore our readers with unimportant information. The tittle of the page is “Fashion and Features” which is very different that your usual tittle “Table of Contents”. Since this is a teens magazine they don’t want to read things that they’ve seen before so by changing the tittle it makes it more unique and fun. We know it’s a table of contents  and readers don’t need to be reminded that it is. Lastly, something that you can’t miss is the big image of singer “Taylor Swift”. Let’s talk a little about her background in the image. We see she’s in some sort of school since there are school supplies around her and a board with one of her song lyrics in the back. This picture is taken from a long angle as she is sitting down and it shows her full body. The purple dress she’s wearing makes her sort of stand out out of all the beige. This picture cover almost all of the background meaning she is definitely what the cover story is about which is why it’s also very close to the page number 96. 

      The bottom half of this magazine page has the article details, page numbers and some of the little hearts. The details feature one or two sentences max. Long paragraphs won’t cut it as they wouldn’t even fit or can be just way too much weight on the overall look of the page. We are trying to draw out readers to make them feel safe inside this pages and relate, having too much words wouldn’t make them interest to go and read the full article. We also see how the page numbers stand out in the red color which is used as the background for the cover page to make everything match. These are a little bigger than the heading and the details making them easier to read and to look for at quick glance. Now let’s look at the Inter sing hearts on the page. These hearts are out of the ordinary or just the authors choice to put them in. But this can mean various things like it could be the celebrities favorite articles, they could be the most fascinating stories, the most liked by the editors, or articles that connect in some way. This hearts definitely make an impression on young viewers, this can tempt them to look at those articles just because of the little hearts. Overall there is a lot to notice about this table of content by just breaking it down. 

Credits:
Cover graphic used/ created in Canva.com

Articles:

1. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/table-of-contents-creative-and-beautiful-examples/

2. https://blog.flipsnack.com/how-to-make-a-table-of-contents-page/

3. http://www.ccplusmedia.com/20-ideas-to-design-your-table-of-contents/

Magazines used:

https://www.teenvogue.com/