Before&After: A Magazine TOC’s Party Mix of Visual Techniques

Downloadables are an exclusive benefit for CreativePro members! (Not a member yet? Join us and get $10 off with the discount code: DOWNLOAD)

Few examples of brevity are better than a magazine’s tables of contents, rolling a publication’s voice, typography, graphics, colors and other elements into a compact menu of titles and micro-“trailers” that convey a lot in tiny spaces. Wired’s contents page is a party mix of numerals, illustrations, lists, bars and visual sprites—visual techniques that can be applied to all kinds of small-space projects. This 11-page article from issue 48 of Before&After Magazine brings you back to a classic Wired magazine table of contents to give you a toy box of visual techniques that you can use on all kinds of projects.

Every image has an expressive core. To reveal it, big graphics are not simply shrunk but reconfigured by masking, re-cropping, rearranging, and so on.

© John McWade/Before&After Magazine, courtesy of Gaye Anne McWade.