Color Effectiveness

The September issue of GQ magazine featured James Franco and they labeled him as the next "James Dean". For this reason, I feel that they purposely used a black and white photo for the article that was written about him here. If you turn to other pages, you will notice that all of the photos are in black and white which I think was done on purpose to make a connection between him and James Dean. They used very large photos of him which made him look bold and strong even though the photos lacked color. Overall, I feel that although it lacked color, the black and whiteness tied well with the article and was effective in delivering the kind of message the writer wanted to deliver.

Color effectiveness

This image was featured in this week's edition of Rolling Stone magazine. I couldn't find a camera to take a shot of the entire spread, but, as you can imagine, the magazine used the intense yellow from the guitar and mirrored it in a portion of the headline "Elvis Costello & The Attraction." Although the color isn't as vibrant or bright as other posts, this small bit of color works. Overall, the image is very dark and the guitar (and the musical bond it represents) is the only real color. But it grabs the reader's attention and is very effective in the overall design.