Double-Page Spread Research - Jamie Ellis

Double-Page spreads are two pages in a magazine working together as one unit, focusing on one particular subject. When designing these spreads it is vital to look at these two pages as one single article, as this is how the public are going to view it. When looking through double page spreads, they tend to have a very large picture of the main subject of the article either on one page, covering it, or in the middle and the article, or at least, the opening of the article. The use of a double page spread is typically only used on an article that was on the front page of the magazine.
 Above, an example of a double page spread
 featuring the image/picture to be in the
 middle of the page and text surrounding it. 


A DPS (Double Page Spread) always has a colour scheme of 2-3 colours. The above example is blue, red and black/grey with white text to stand out on the background.

Similarly to my research into DPS's in my AS course, The images in the DPS have meanings to them, they can mean many different things to different people. The quote near the bottom middle-left of the example above is "It took a toll on me. I felt so small" and the fact that in the image, the subject is looking down, his whole body language is very reclusive, he's trying not to show too much of himself. This links to his quote as he feels/felt small and with his body language, he's trying to not show too much almost as if he's trying to hide himself away.

That was just a specific example and could be extrapolated when looking at other images in other double-page spreads.

So, when we're making our own, we're going to fish out a good quote from the documentary and use that in the double page spread.

We're probably going to take some specific shots of either our subjects or presenter for the image in the DPS, depending on which quote we'd like to pull from the documentary. Then, we can use that image to begin to create a more effective DPS.

An interesting layout which might be hard to pull off, would be having the entire image as our background and then the text on top. This would be challenging, due to the fact that the text would need to be visible on the picture, but not be to overpowering to ruin the picture and draw attention away from it or make it hard to make out.

A more basic layout would be to have the picture and quote take up 75% of one page and really be a big eye-catcher to make people stop and read the article. Hopefully, this would make the readers want to watch the documentary after reading the interesting article on it.