Research for this project required us collecting different magazines, newspapers and dividing them into ones that look immediately easy to read and ones that don’t. I decided to then try and annotate my thoughts on this using Photoshop to create a side by side image of the magazine cover and an example article…

I split the magazine’s into two categories, easy to read or hard to read (at first glance):

Hard to read:

Time magazine was a slightly confusing choice, from the front cover it looks like it would be easy to read, but I find the articles harder to read:

Again from the front cover Elle magazine looks fairly legible/readable. But the article I’ve analysed isn’t immediately easy to read:

Below is the front page article from ‘The Coventry Observer’ a local free newspaper. Some elements are easier to read than other, so my comments are quite mixed :

Easy to read:

Vogue looks easy to read from the front cover, the fonts are all large enough to be legible. The article I’ve analysed also was easier to read than articles from other magazines:

Below are two articles from the same magazine called ‘Mollie Makes’. I’ve placed them side by side as one is easy to read and the other is not:

I found it quite surprising doing this exercise, that there didn’t seem to be one main method for type layout. Each magazine seemed to do things slightly differently, and none of them were completely illegible or unreadable but just had varying degrees of success.  I’m also not sure my analysis of the text is entirely accurate, surely this is also subject to an individual’s perspective?