First Thoughts on House Styles

    Recently I learned the format of house styles of a magazine. At first, I was truly confused because they were so many elements that go into creating a magazine such as a table of contents, front cover, side stories, main stories, the pictures themselves, the captions, the titles, etc. however before I can start to make my mock magazine I will have to know these elements so I can implement them in my product. 

      I’m going to guess that it was hard for me to understand when my teacher was explaining it because I was not in the right state of mind to learn due to stressed about outside factors but now that she posted the explanation of each element, it has made it easier. I searched up examples on the Internet how to dissect the magazine and they were very helpful. I like how they clearly stated why certain things were used and what impact they had on choosing that style, picture, title, and caption, for the magazine cover. 

    To break it down, house styles is the way a publisher will present its self using its own unique style. Each and every magazine has its own house Styles. For example, such as Bazzar and The Week, can have the subject of the main photo cover part of the master head because they’re widely known. And let’s say National Geographic Traveler, they normally have the main subject of their photo far from the camera. And Times always had a border around their photo framing the magazine cover. Upfront magazine usually has primary colored master heads, sometimes white. When it comes to Vogue magazine, the color scheme always monochrome with a pop of color. However for Essence magazine, their master head changes from bold to no bolded, if not change of font. Their supporting cover lines seem to have the same bold, capitalized style also.

    House styles are developed because of how a company wants to present themselves. They use vibrant colors to give off a articulated vibe such as using blue which creates a serious, trust vibe. Or using Black which gives off sophistication. The mix of fonts that’s chosen has to please the eyes while sticking to their house style, so they carefully chose each one out. You’re more likely to use “fun” fonts instead of “formal” fonts if you want your magazine to be bright, youthful , and colorful. 

     In addition, depending on the genre of the magazine, the font changes also. For instance, a gaming magazine’s font would look very different from a science magazine. Science magazine would look more formal instead of uniformly graphic like a gaming one would look. The master head may also be different. Gaming may have a smaller gaming head so it catches the eye of the reader while a science has a bigger header so it’s know that they published this new information. 

      Your target audience also changes how you would present your magazine. Essence, for example, they use mainly black or POC as their subject in the main photo. This is to appeal to the black community since this is one of the new age black magazines that people can look at. Because before, black pepper weren’t covers of magazines.

    Seeing how house styles are unique to each magazine, it makes it easy to point them out when looking at a magazine. You notice the patterns easier.