Wednesday 5 February 2014

Exercise Hierarchy Part 2 A review in a computer magazine

Magazines I looked at had a picture of the product reviewed plus text, a box with main features/highlights and a star rating. Body text was sans serif but headers were with serifs.
I used a photo of my elderly but now broken A3 printer and built my review around it
 Initially using Arial as my body text and Gill Sans Bold as the header but it looked like something from a comic book so I tried Aharoni. The headline is in black for boldness and the subheadings in dark blue which doesn't have much "punch" also I don't like the way Aharoni deals with numbers .

Sticking with Arial as the body text I tried Arial Rounded MT Bold for the header and subheadings and purple for the subheadings.
 This is better but not quite right so I went for Lucida Console as the header and subheading text as it has a modern computerish feel and Mangal for the body text which I feel is complementary. I like this but the burgundy red doesn't feel right for a computer magazine and red (used in some of my researched examples) looks cheap to me. This takes up more than one page but maybe that would make the article feel "looser"  as it blends into the next page. I guess the use of this would depend on the type of advertising commonly displayed in the magazine and whether there were a series of reviews which could be blended together hence encouraging the reader to read reviews they may not have originally chosen. Text that takes up more space is good if you want a thick magazine with less content but costs more to produce.
 I prefer dark green for the header and a lighter green for the subheadings which speaks quality to me.

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