Thursday, February 18, 2010

Alternative Press


Ah yes, Alternative Press (AP)....how spastic you are? AP magazine is defiantly catering to a middle/high school music audience who loves rock music. First off, their flag is a big stretched out AP with the words alternative press below it which is not terribly noticeable even though it is the same color. The flag tends to work because there is always so many words on the front page (usually at the top and bottom to tease bands). Personally it is kind of big and stretched for my taste but it is simple. The color is always a bright, obnoxious, neon blue, pink, red or yellow. This works because the audience needs something to get their attention but because the letters are so thick it can be overwhelming. Each of their standard sections has the same headline but the individual headlines for each story are usually yellow and have a thick, boxy and san-serif font. This gives the magazine a tougher feel that matches the flag. Teenagers, especially who read AP, tend to have short attention spans so the bright colors and bold headlines stand out to them.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Pleasanton Weekly

Kudos to the staff, they have a better publication than most town newspapers. The paper is set up like a magazine on the cover and center-spread but it looks like a newspaper on the other pages. Let me talk about image and text. They usually only have one picture per page and it is in the middle of the page. However, when they have more than one picture they do have dominant art. The publication needs more art and the pictures (while they try to not get a whole lot of people posing for the camera) are not that interesting.

The front page is always one big picture and a headline but the picture is usually the main feature person posing in the camera and should not be the whole page. They need to have some stories on the front or at least some words to fill the open space the picture leaves. There are teasers for the inside but color boxes would add life to it. There are stroke lines around the pictures which I don't like and their stroke lines in between stories should be darker and not the same weight as the pictures. Their stories are pretty short so they have wide columns. Their spacing is fine but I noticed that they center their headlines that are more than one across and also their bylines and decks. In order to distinguish the two the bylines are in bold.

Pleasanton Weekly Home Page

Monday, February 1, 2010

It Happens to Everyone...So Share It!

So I have to post a video and this one makes me laugh everytime.



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