Uni is back in session for another year (my third, in case you were wondering…) and it’s media, media, media this year.

In the past, my degree has allowed me to dabble in other arts areas, but in the final year it’s time to get serious about the biz. And for the most part, it would seem, this means media research.

Personally, I find this area really enjoyable but have struggled deciding upon a relevant topic of interest for my first large-scale (okay, large-ish..let’s be honest, it’s only 8000 words…) research project.  I love social media, I love blogs, I love magazines, I love television – I couldn’t nail down exactly what I cared most about to actually fill my 8000 words.

I’ve finally decided today that I’m going to conduct some research into Fashion Blogs and Fashion Magazines. I wrote an essay last year exploring the similarities in tone and content blogs and magazines share in an industry analysis of Australian women’s magazines.

In this paper, I wrote -

The future of magazines is tied up with the future of advertising. Australian women’s magazines are suffering the most with statistics demonstrating changes in taste and an audience willing to share magazines rather than pay for their own issue (Australian Press Council, 2008, p. 2.17). Thus, the role these physical objects play can, perhaps, be effectively translated to the online medium in light of the inevitable, albeit slow, decline in funds to support their print versions…….The problem is not that the function and need for magazines has diminished, but that its income is declining and must be sourced elsewhere. If online forms can embody all that consumers want from magazines, then blogs such as Girl with a Satchel, could be self-sufficient, if not one day profitable, alternatives to continue the legacy of magazines if they are to eventually fail.

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“A contents page must be lucid, easy to absorb and simple enough to require no effort on anyone’s part to figure it out. Also, the contents page must appear important, underlining the inherent importance of the material covered by the publication. Furthermore, the contents page must be easy to find”

- p. 33, Designing….for Magazines by  Jan V. White

I don’t know about you guys, but I oh-so-very-rarely even glance at the contents page of a magazine, regardless of whether I’ve read the magazine before or not.

I generally just start at the beginning and work my way through the issue, sticking bright heart-shaped post-it notes on pages that catch my eye. However, Jan V. White seems to think they’re crucial aspects of editorial design, designating an entire chapter to them in her book.

So, why is a contents page important? White suggests that there are different kinds of magazine readers – those who skim, those who skip straight to the cover story and those who start at the contents page – and thus a contents page provides magazine editors with some small bit of control over how much and what content is read by a reader. On a web page, some sort of navigation seems more crucial to me than it does in a print magazine – when you can’t skip ahead to content, how else are you going to find it?? Editors design contents pages with the hopes that the reader has come to it straight from the cover.

White outlines a few different typical errors which are usually made on a contents page including too much material, overbearing slogans, too much focus on staff names and poor text grouping which results in an overly grey page (p. 36, White 1976).

The Verdict:

Given that it was my first real time reading a magazine contents page, I was surprised at how easily I was frustrated by the advertising. If I were frantically searching for an article, I must wade through at least one page of advertising between each page of the contents pages. Yes, at least one. Not to mention the 29 pages of advertising which precedes the beginning of the contents pages (!). For some who flips through the pages, for the most part enjoying the fashion spreads, this isn’t really an issue. If I were a reader who actually was after some specific information, I would have given up and put the magazine back on the shelf. Lost me at hello.

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Inspired by this article on Real Simple and my return to uni next week, I was inspired to clean and organise my cluttered workspace. This involved clearing out my bookshelf, only to find a whole STACK of books that I have purchased and haven’t gotten around to reading.

I feel awfully wasteful. The front-most pile is the ‘unread’ pile – I’ve read the back two!

I know I musn’t be the only one with this bad habit. However, I am going to tackle this pile this year, once and for all. One book at a time…

Shop Til You Drop is a unique magazine.

To the untrained eye, or merely naive consumer, it’s just another girly glossy. However, upon even the tiniest bit of inspection, it becomes clear that it is a unique hybrid of marketing and magazine culture. Normally, magazines want to disguise the fact that they’re advertising products for fear of appearing bias and financially swayed. STYD does the complete opposite, exploiting the advertising-magazine-shopping cycle that makes for a healthy fashion industry. STYD approaches shopping and consumption as a cultural phenomenon, which makes it a particularly interesting case study when it comes to its editorial design.

STYD is not marketed as a catalogue, but as a magazine, and the design becomes a key feature in distinguishing it from a mere junk mail. This results in a very, VERY powerful marketing weapon.

About Shop Til You Drop:

• Monthly magazine published by magazine giant, ACP Magazines
• Described as “ a magazine based entirely on the rush of shopping. It makes fashion easy – cleverly translating trends so they work in real life – and the unique captioning system lets the reader shop directly from the page: before you even set foot in a store you know where to get what you want, if it comes in your size and whether you can buy it online. SHOP is a complete experience – the fun, indulgent escape women have been looking for.”
• The only Australian magazine based entirely on shopping as a cultural experience
• Covers fashion, beauty and lifestyle
• Aimed at women 16-39
• Circulation: 80694 (ABC Jun 09)
• Readership: 174,000 (RMR Sep 09)

Design Characteristics:

Upon first glance, much the same as most other high-selling Australian glossies. Large amounts of text on cover always featuring a single celebrity image. Inside, tends towards minimalist design using white backgrounds with equal amounts of text and images. Pages are often very content heavy, but no where near Cosmo territory.

The Cover:

(click to enlarge)