Exercise: Research published layouts

Magazines and papers aren't something that I buy a lot of. I purposefully bought some music magazines for the purpose of research for the assignment but I didn't want to have to spend excess money on magazines for the exercises, as they aren't cheap!

Looking at a monthly food magazine that my dad gets, I did manage to get some layout research in. I would like to have a look at the National Geographic magazine though to compare, so I will see what I can do and post back when I have.

In regards to the food magazine, I found a lot of different page layouts.

June 2015 issue Sainsbury's Magazine

June 2015 issue Sainsbury's Magazine

June 2015 issue Sainsbury's Magazine

June 2015 issue Sainsbury's Magazine

June 2015 issue Sainsbury's Magazine

 Up until this point ( and the last of my examples), all the layouts have been text based, and so the pictures are mostly small and don't take up much space. They are additions to the text, to illustrate it.

June 2015 issue Sainsbury's Magazine

June 2015 issue Sainsbury's Magazine

 The two images above are more picture based layouts. so you have one big gallery type image with one or more additional complementing images.

June 2015 issue Sainsbury's Magazine

I actually really like the above layout. It seems to work really well. The images take up half the page but as all the text is underneath the yellow 'banner' it doesn't distract from the images. even the captions are on top of the images so they don't take anything away from the photographs themselves.

June 2015 issue Sainsbury's Magazine

Edit: I managed to have a look at the National Geographic Magazine today and in contrast to the typical layouts above, it's set out a lot more photograph focussed. The photos seemed to be full size page photographs against a page of text or even where there was text on the page too, the photographs still took priority over the text. The pages are a lot more glossy than regular magazines, giving the impression of much better quality and a reason for the pricing, but it reminds me of a photo book. A lot of gallery type layouts to emphasise the photographs.