How House Style is Established

To establish a house style, the first thing you need to do is come up with a colour scheme that will closely be followed throughout the magazine. This house style must be one that reflects the feelings and emotions of the magazine's target audience. For example, a metal magazine would be likely to have lots of browns and reds and blacks as they are all colours that would suggest anger. An electronic music magazine would be more likely to have bright colours like pink and blue contrasting with darker shades to show the wide variety of emotions displayed in the music of the bands. For my particular magazine, I am targeting an Indie Rock audience, so I have decided to go with a red, black, yellow and white colour scheme as Indie Rock has several artists who associate their music with relieving stress.

As we can see from this copy of Kerrang! magazine, both the contents page and the front page share the same colours of fonts and background colours, with the occasional reversal of colours (i.e a white background instead of red)





The second thing to consider when it comes to establishing a house style is the consistency of your fonts. The most important thing in creating the correct image for your magazine is the font used for your masthead and headings. For example, if you use a font that seems fancy and is reminiscent of  calligraphy then you are unlikely to attract the attention of a metal fan. Once you have decided upon the desired font for your masthead, it is unlikely that you will move away from this style as it can lead to the page looking disproportionate.

 This is an example of how NME have similar fonts
across their masthead and their headings on the front page.
This will most likely carry over to the contents page and the double page
 spreads as well. 

The cover lines of NME also show yellow and white font that is an easily readable san serif font. 

A font similar to this is used on the contents page to show consistency in the design of the magazine.