House Style

How is house style established?

Definition:

House style is established by creating a fluent colour scheme, and typography throughout the magazine. This is important as it makes the magazine have a continuous feel, and ensures that each page is aesthetically connected to every other page. Having a house style makes the magazine more memorable, and achieves recognition simply through using a recurring visual theme. 

Creating a clear, unified house style is important because it enables the reader to easily identify the magazine simply through a few constantly appearing features. NME use red as a main colour, but in other cases primary block colours, as a fill colour for the boxes around article text and titles. This is to pick up on the original design of the magazine masthead which has white writing and a red box around it. They also use the same font for feature titles throughout, this can be seen in my examples for the words 'repeat' and 'inside'. the typography has a stencil effect and thick black lines in order to create a 'scrapbook' or 'home made' feel, rather than the more formal fonts and layout seen in magazines such as Q or Mixmag. 

Images:

As you can see magazines use images which are similar in colours and styles for the main image on the front page and the images used for the double page spreads of the feature. A variety of shots is used within the double page spread, but because of the similar looks, colours, and backgrounds, the reader is able to identify the main feature as the same article as on the front. 

 
 

These images are all from Q magazine, but are from different issues. despite this, they all have a similar essence of simplicity and creativity, usually involving the colour red somehow to reflect the logo of the magazine. 









Design features: 

Using recurring design elements helps to unify the magazines style, and ensure that a magazine is easy to identify on every page: even if the articles are contrasting, it is visually easy to place them in the same magazine. 

 These are some common design features used within a proliferation of magazines, which help not only make it more aesthetically pleasing, but also helps connect the front page, contents and dps together, as there is a recurring theme throughout.