L03: Following Codes and Conventions

Throughout the pre-production and production of my magazine, the various issues of 'Tabletop Gaming' magazine has inspired some of my decisions. However, where this magazine uses images of TTRPG characters and environments to show the creativity of TTRPGs, I wanted to make my magazine feel more human and less intimidating in order to target newer TTRPG players. To do this, I used a medium close-up shot of Michael Hearne (a real TTRPG player) looking intrigued and excited by a minifigure. Furthermore, I took this photo at an eye-level angle as it connotes equality between the audience and Michael, it also presents Michael as an ideal self/ partner. Although it isn't relevant to the conventions of a magazine, the clothes that Michael is wearing on my front cover connote creativity and imagination which both reflect the conventions of TTRPGs.

My choice of house colours (Blue, Yellow and Red) are relatively similar to the 'Tabletop Gaming' magazine whose house colours are Orange, White and Black. The red and orange colours across both covers create a sense of adrenaline which reflects the dangerous adventure within TTRPGs. The use of the colour yellow connotes treasure which is common throughout the majority of TTRPGs. I differed from the traditional TTRPG magazine house colour conventions by using the colour blue. The reason for this is that blue is a friendly colour which has a connotation of stability and security.

Another difference in convention that I made is the font style. The Tabletop Gaming magazine uses all-caps for its puffs and coverlines. This comes across as visually noisy and intimidating, as my magazine is targeted towards new players, I opted for not using all-caps as it come across more calm and welcoming.

For the double page spread of my magazine, I also took inspiration from Tabletop Gaming magazine. The Tabletop Gaming magazine double page spread to the right uses a lot of angular shapes, to me this denotes dice, and this is a convention that I wanted to stick with. I also noticed from analysing this, and other TTRPG magazines, that they tend to use images of real TTRPGs and board games. Seen as a lot of my magazine intends to build community, I wanted to take a photo that showed a group of people playing a TTRPG together.

Every magazine double page spread that I found used black writing on a white background. I found that this wasn't very accessible, especially for dyslexic people. To amend this, I decided to ignore this convention and use a more parchment like colour. This would make my magazine more accessible, but it also suits the TTRPG genre more. 

Although it is not a convention of TTRPG genre magazines specifically, the majority of magazine double page spreads use 2 or three columns of text, allowing them to provide a lot more information. The purpose of this specific article (Tabletop Role-Play Games for Beginners) is to provide a brief insight into the very basics of TTRPGs, and to encourage people to play TTRPGs. To accomplish this, I have chosen to only use 1 column of text to make the page look less intimidating to beginners. If I was to produce the other articles in this magazine, I would use 2 columns on each page.

The contents page to the right is from the magazine, Retro Gamer.

I liked the layout of this contents page, as it manages to give you the title of each section along with a teaser of the contents of that section. For this page I mostly stuck to the conventions of relatively compact text and less images. Because my magazine is targeted towards a very niche audience, it has less articles and I would naturally need the text to be less compact, and I would need more space to be taken up with graphics such as puffs and images.

The main difference I made from the usual magazine conventions is how I showed the page numbers. I really wanted to sell the idea that this magazine is purely about TTRPGs, and the best way to do this was with the most well known part of any TTRPG, dice. So, I positioned the page numbers onto the sides of dice outlines.