Colour scheme research

When choosing a colour scheme I need to use colours that not only relate to the genre of my magazine but compliment each other. This is important due to colour been one of the most appealing things to the human eye. Bold and bright colours suggest the magazine is lively, dark colours suggest the magazine is most likely within the rock genre due to they are the colours society link to conventional rock music. Subtle and light colours work well to compliment and balance bright and dark as it adds balance.


I am going to look at some magazine covers so that I can see and compare a variety of colour schemes and why they chose those specific colours. Straight away I noticed that for the majority of the covers the subject on the main image is wearing colours similar to the colour scheme. It is most likely that the colour scheme is determined before even taking the pictures. I also noticed that around a lot of the text there is a black outline to make the text bolder. I also noticed that it has became more of a convention that rock magazines always have the colour white and black. For my magazine I am going to most likely follow this convention and use black and white, for other colours I am debating between red, as this is a very common colour for rock magazines. Or yellow as this is also very common and works really well to highlight specific areas. Perhaps I shall use both as I have also seen both of them used on a range of magazine covers.