Creating my contents page

I initially struggled when creating my contents page, and it was the part of my magazine that I had to research the most, as the layout was difficult to achieve without it looking amateur. My first attempt at creating a contents page was made before I had thoroughly researched contents pages in existing music magazines, meaning that, as a result, it looked empty, unexciting and unprofessional. One of the main issues I had was the layout of the photos; all of the photos I used were personal photos I had taken at concerts, but I struggled in knowing where to put them on the page:


At this point I had collected in the results from my second survey, and did some additional research; I noticed that in most contents pages including several images, the images tend to be parallel and evenly spaced out, so I attempted to emulate this on my own contents page, which made a great improvement:



Another problem was the fact that my contents column didn't include many articles, and didn't take up much space on the page; it also looked quite amateur. After researching contents pages in existing music magazines, I found out that they the articles are usually divided into sections so that they were more accessible, so I added a few more articles to my contents, which added more variety, and then divided each article into categories:


I then added a border using the "stroke" tool.

I also put all the page numbers at the beginning of each article name (as is done in most magazines) to make the contents column clearer.
Next, I made a new subscribe box, again using the "stroke" tool to make a border and a font from www.dafont.com, and included in it a reference to downloading the magazine online, a form of cross-media convergence that is common for magazines today. I then used the "stroke" tool to make a border around it:


Finally, I put page numbers onto the corners of the images, so as to make their relevant articles more accessible, and made a red bar along the top by using the "rectangular marquee" and the "fill" tools; this not only filled in the blank space, but made the contents page considerably more eye-catching: