Table of Contents – Playbill Magazine

This is the Table of Contents for Playbill Magazine (that little program you get at a Broadway show). I like the simplicity, brief single-sentence descriptions, and the hierarchy of elements. I think this basic format is used because the contents are all on one page (8″ x 5.5″ dimensions), so it is a very small space to work with. I think there is somewhat of a grid for the type and images separately, but because they don’t line up too well, it’s hard to see how one cohesive grid could be used for both of them. Grid or no grid, the images are still visually pleasing next to the type, so I don’t see any issues there. The emphasis is on the bold type, which includes the headings and article titles. The orange color is also used to further emphasize the headings, as well as the Playbill logo.

Table of Contents

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I looked at the contents from two different magazines Life and People. They both are special edition magazines about Robin Williams and Queen. Both are simple designs with the emphasis being on the images. I like the Robin Williams one more because I like that it gives descriptions of each section. You can see that the grid is used to place the text between the images. The Queen magazine is very simply, so the modular grid is really clear in the column to the right. I personally think the design for the contents in the Queen magazine would look better in the Robin Williams magazine, and vice versa.

National Geographic Table of Contents

One thing I have always admired about National Geographic is their design skills on their magazines, especially how clean they always seem to make them. With the 3 examples above the one that strikes me the most is the middle design. Just that one image and how it is cropped really grasps my attention and intrigues me to continue looking at the rest of the content on the page, even if it may not be related to the image.

When developing a table of contents it is important to direct your readers attention to the most eye grabbing content so that they stay interested, and then continue to keep them interested by the content that follows. I always felt National Geographic has done a great job of this.

Well Designed Table of Contents

When creating a table of contents, one must design with typography, pictures, and negative space in mind.

I have selected a table of contents from the New York Times Magazine to analyze. I found that this table of contents uses an underlying modular grid to organize the various elements on the page in such a way that creates visual interest.

The title is placed within the top left corner of the grid in large capital letters in an interesting serif typeface. The articles are placed to the right of the title in smaller, bold letters. The page numbers of the articles are colored a vibrant orange which creates a typographic emphasis– they stand out from all the other elements on the page. To hold the readers interest, the designer of this page does not overwhelm the viewer with a large amount of text, but rather a large group of pictures in the bottom half of the page–that seem to show a timeline event described in a photographic progression. As green is featured in these pictures, the green color is also carried into a description about the pictures besides the articles in the top right corner. The orange color featured in the article numbers is also found at the bottom of the page in a small quote which contains a societal confrontation about climate change.

I found this page to be a great balance of typographic elements, hierarchy, pictures, color, and negative space. This balance keeps the reader interested and moving through the magazine.

Table of Contents

I love the clean minimal look of this table of contents. It’s evident that they used a baseline grid. The clean almost techno quality of this really caught my attention. The use of numbers as images and as dynamic pieces that eliminate images is a interesting concept.

Table of Contents Design

I personally love this design for a table of contents, because it is easy to read while also having a beautiful and interesting look to it. I’m a sucker for minimalism, so the white space and the simplicity of mimicking the circle on the left onto the text is really unique and aesthetically pleasing to me.

Table of Contents

I had an odd difficult time finding a very modern type of table of contents. But, interesting enough, I enjoyed looking at how simple older table of contents were. This book, The Land of Oz: the Further Adventures of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, is from 1904 and uses all kinds of simple. The images only relate to the characters in the book, the font seems to be consistent, and the color well is black. There’s not a lot of hierarchy since the page was made to its simplest form. It’s all straight to the point for the readers to not get distracted or possibly overwhelmed because there is too much going on in the page. Now a days, of course, it could be better. It could be designed with various font and possibly add color (since its feasible) to create hierarchy and a more appealing, eye-grabbing look. But for a 1904 book, it’s not too bad, just in it’s simplest form of design.

Table of Contents

When I started looking for table of contents designs this was definitely not the example I thought I would be most drawn to. At first, I was looking for a design that was colorful and had images, something that would really catch my eye; so by deciding on this one was surprising to myself. The reason I think this table of contents is done so well is the realization that sometimes it can be quite annoying trying to find what you’re looking for in a table of contents page. This design has massive stand out font for both topic and location. Anyone at any age can quickly and efficiently locate what their looking for with ease. Even though the layout uses no color and no imagery, it serves the exact purpose a table of contents page should.

Table of Contents

Blog Post 6

A book that I found that had an interesting use of typography and organizational layout was Snoop Dogg’s cookbook, “From Crook to Cook”.  The table of contents is designed very unconventionally compared to other traditional table of contents. The titles of each chapter use a mix of a very traditional, royal serif font for the first letter and a clean sans serif font for the rest of the phrase. It’s a very odd combination but works well with the overall personality and tone of the book and helps to portray the voice that Snoop Dogg brings to his book. The headings for the chapter names (i.e. Introduction, Chapter 1, etc.) are in a small bold sans serif font that helps draw attention to itself but not enough so it takes away from the actual title. The layout of the list is not in any tradition chart/grid format, however displayed across the spread to fill the page and interact with each other through spacing. The background colors are also muted and light that help draw the attention to the font and not disrupting the reader. 

Table of Contents

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I chose to write about the table of contents in my Intro into Communications class not because it looks nice, but its the first book I have noticed that has both a brief description for content and an in depth section; which I have never noticed in a textbook before. In the brief contents section, the information follows a hierarchy of the part title, then the chapter number and name, and lastly the part number as the least important bit of information. Hierarchy is created through changing the size and weight of the font and there isn’t much color difference with the text because only the “part one, part two,..” have their opacity decreased.

For the more in depth part of the contents, none of the words are colored either; only the change in the font weight is used for the text however this doesn’t mean that there is no color used. Instead color is used to call out the chapter number, name and page number to show this information as the most important. Then, each subsection of the chapter is is larger and heavier then the last part of information. All of the page numbers are same size and are the same size as the subsection titles because the author believed that this information was equally important to the readers. The remaining use of color for these pages are used as bullet points for more important bits of information.

Of course this book isn’t one I actively searched for, it’s one that I was assigned to read in class. Therefore, it’s designed to look like a normal learning textbook and I wouldn’t normally pick up this book and read it. I just believe that it makes the readers experience easier what looking for a specific section and that might appeal to the professor assigning the book if they notice this detail.