Conventional Contents Page

This is a magazine contents page I designed for a wild-life themed magazine. I'll discuss why I made some of the choices that I made:

I chose to make the contents page highly pictorial because I think that a portion of the audience relies on interesting animal or plant photographs to guide them. I find that sometimes magazines bombard the readers with information on the contents page, however this layout is much more simple for the audience as it allows them to think "hm... I want to see monkeys.... I'll go to page 13".
I chose a minimal grid template because with loads of pictures and bright colours, it would be easy to make this spread look too flamboyant and sort of, messy, therefore I prioritised order and neatness by making this images sit next to each other consistently.

When I think of nature, the first colours that I think of are green and blue, therefore these are the primary colours for the contents page. To choose the font colours, I used the eye-dropper tool in photoshop to select the hues within the water in the main image of the sloth, and doing this achieved the blue-turquoise fonts. I chose to highlight keywords such as animal names and locations with vivid shades of blue, as eyes will be drawn to these words especially.

As I said before I aspired for a minimal grid format on the contents page therefore I went for the most obvious and unembellished shape, rectangles. I decided this would be simple and easy to read. Additionally, with rectangles, it's easy to see which item of text corresponds to which picture.
I chose to place the page number in circular overlays of the pictures as this is easy to spot and stands out without being too bright and distracting.

In the bottom left hand corner there is a promotion which advises the audience to subscribe to the magazines monthly subscription as they will receive a teddy bear in return. I saw this done in Vogue's magazines contents page which I annotated a while ago, and I thought that feature would also be useful here, as this magazine has a precise audience who enjoy animal conceited things.

The pictures in the contents page were mainly found on Pinterest.com, aside from the sloth image which I got from the BBC website. I chose pictures based on the variety of animals and also, I selected pictures that are high definition and strong in colour, as I feel that these qualities make the contents page more interesting and captivating.

What this task made me consider, which I hadn't considered before, was the variety that is intrinsic between each article line. When I was thinking about making this contents page, I just assumed that all the text would just be "our animal photoset from *location*", over and over in synonymous ways. However this task made me realise that that's boring. So one of the things that I assessed in an indepth manner was how much each article differed from the other. (I think I succeeded as the articles jump from television to local news to wildlife decline to story-time to a photoset to information to an eco-debate.)