Developing Our House Style

To create a series of successful magazines, we had to develop a house style that each of the members of our group would follow when they created their issue of our music magazine. From our previous research on other magazines we found out by developing a house style for our magazine it allows each issue to be recognised easily and it creates consistent codes, conventions and ideologies of our magazine.

The features that we kept consistent throughout the issues of our magazine on our front cover where the masthead, including it’s positioning and colour. We did this to enable the viewer to immediately recognise the title of the magazine. The tagline underneath the masthead reads, ‘Keep in tune with Burst.’ We thought this would be an appropriate tagline for our magazine because it shows the musical genre of the magazine and is quirky and fun. The tagline remains in the same place underneath the masthead as well as the dateline and price. The barcode also remains in the same corner of the front cover.

The features that we kept consistent throughout the contents page where the banners and titles we used, positioning of sections including the editor’s letters. Each one of our contents pages is constructed in a similar way. The differences are that the stories advertised in our issues are different and our editor’s letters are different. The fonts we have used in our contents page have remained the same to develop our house style further. We have changed the colours on our contents pages to add variation.

In our double page spreads we have used similar language which is informal so it relates to our young target audience. The same fonts are also used so the magazine is recognisable and each of our double page spreads have similar denotations which result in them having similar connotations that will continue to appeal to our target audience no matter what issue they are reading.

By developing our house style it means that our magazine has the qualities of a real magazine that is being sold. It makes our magazine look more professional and means that it can be recognised easily by readers.