One of the main things is to clearly label your contents page with a big header if possible, so your reader can find it easily and without any hassle...
I found the font for this title on http://www.dafont.com/, it is large and bold therefore there will be no problems for my reader.
I chose the theme colours of black and a sort of army green, both very earthy colours which fits in well with the grime genre as it originates from the streets, a plain white background I thought was too plain so I simply gave it a series of stripes in two of the corners using the rectangle tool on Photoshop.
Through my research I found that quite a few music magazines liked to incorporate a miniature version of there masthead or logo on their contents page, I thought this was a good idea as it just adds that something extra to the page.
At this stage of creating my contents page, I reached a problem my lined background has clashed with my contents title, although most people would still be able to read the title it did not look very professional, after trying out a few different options, I settled on giving the the part of the title which clashes an outer glow in the army green colour I used already.
As you can see the outer glow makes the last part of my title much more visible and also looks very effective.
When creating my contents page I was following a draft layout I had already prepared, so the next stage of my contents page was laying out the bases for my images and actual contents script.
I coloured the boxes sticking to my theme colours, yet the 4 image boxes on the right of the page I felt blended in a bit too much so I decided to add a drop shadow to each box.
The next step was typing up what was on each page, the font I used for this was the same as my main title font as it still looked affective in a smaller size, I used white coloured font on a black background this made it stand out a lot more and therefore made it easier to read. I also decided to write my page numbers in letters e.g. 'Twelve' I have seen this being used before but not very often so I thought it would be an interesting method to try out.
Instead of just dotting images around my contents page I used a technique which is used my many real music magazines today, this technique is giving the reader a preview of what is on some of the pages in the magazine, I put an image, the page number and page title in each box, this I felt made my contents page look more like the real thing.
After finally adding all my preview images and titles here is what I came out with...
I was pleased with this as my contents page, but I thought I would give my other draft layout a go just to have something to compare it with, I kept the exact same images, theme etc. I just moved things about a little to match my other layout draft.
The problems I found with this layout was that everything looked a bit out of place, there was lots of white spaces, and I had to make my images smaller in order for them to fit each side of the contents, this made them less clearer, there was also alot of overlapping due to lack of space. Overall I felt my first contents page looked good, wasn't too overcrowded and had a nice layout.
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