Page design elements in design magazines: visual design analysis and comparison of The XOXO The Mag and Alldesign magazines

Although the magazine publishing has been developing and recording changes every day, designs have been going on to be used in accordance with the specific principles and criteria. Today, the desktop publishing programs have also increasingly kept their development and their processes have been automated day by day with advances in software technology. It was investigated by this study by considering which criteria the design process could be performed when desiring a new magazine. By examining the current design magazines being currently published an evaluation was performed on the samples. This study was prepared as an assistant for magazine design process. In the first part of the study an overview of the magazine concept was made. According to the magazine's target audience and content, the superiorities and weaknesses of magazines were examined. In the next part, the subjects like page layout, page design principles, use of images, colour, grids, typography in page designs were examined. All of these concepts related to the creation process of a magazine are significantly affect the quality of the product to be created. Analysing the constituent elements of the page, on a page generally in the magazine publishing there are; headline, intro, body text, pull quotes, subtitle, image, image caption, and by-line and credits, running head, folio elements. The layout on the page grid structure and formal qualifications of these elements constitute the page design. Independent designs have been created for various content sections in the magazine pages and are used as a template till changing it a new design on all pages of the magazine. In the next part, the comparative analysis of the two magazines selected from the design industry. The investigation criteria have been established in the framework of the concepts examined in the previous part. Comparison criteria and examination components were determined as; page size, number of pages, use of colour and images, grid usage, spaces, text font family, the sequence into the space of the text, page elements, cover, content, masthead/credits, flow between pages. The magazines were investigated, listed and reviewed as a result according to these criteria. Key words: Graphic Design, Magazine Design, Layout, Page Design, Grid Usage, Typography, Magazine Page Components.