Feature Articles - Ideas and Analysis of Others

In the October/November issue of Vibe magazine, there are 2 very different types of feature article. Although neither of them would be the style I am looking for, I could use ideas from them both to help me with my feature article.
One of the feature articles is to do with twitter, and more specifically, what famous artists have been tweeting lately. The article is colourful and visually attractive - it uses and very simple blue/white colour palette which works well, and the layout is good too, with rounded boxes, rounded pictures and once again - varied text size. Although this is not the type of article I will be doing, (Mine will be more like an interview) there are defiantly things that I could use from this article to make my article better. In the rounded boxes there are specific bits of information aside from everyones tweets - there is a box about Kanye West joining twitter, a story about FABOLOUS and T-pain, and 'displays of public affection,' of course, all on twitter. In between and around all these boxes are the tweets themselves. The name of the person tweeting is in bold white letters, and the tweets themselves are in standard white letters. Some of the tweets have a small picture next to them, and these tweets have a bigger font size as they are most important/funny/controversial tweets. The variation of Short stories, tweets, pictures and small bits of text keep this page interesting and appealing to look at. With a layout like this, is does not seem a chore to read a lot of writing, since it is all spread out, varied and with a good colour scheme.

The other article is an interview with "Soulja Boy." It's very much a simple article, which is laid out nicely and will appeal to people who are interested in reading about him. It is a 6 page article, and has an "order" of picture, writing, picture, writing. The main background colour is a plain white, and the only other colours in the article are white and red (aside from the pictures) This is very much a colour scheme which I am interested in for the magazine generally, since it is kept simple, but because the background is white it makes the simple colours stand out.

For the first page, there is a title which says "Life of a shooting star" which takes up half of the first page. It is a centered title in a graffiti style writing, which large speech marks and a stylish underline. Under the title is a short sentence which gives an overview of what the article is about - this is written in black. Further below this is the name of the writer and photographer, with a little symbol so you know which person is which - This is in red writing. When the article begins, the first sentence is "Soulja Boy is boiling inside." The 'S' takes up three lines, and his entire name is in red before the rest of the article is in black. From what I have just said, you can see how the page is varied in it's simple colours and styles to keep the page looking interesting, and this is what I would like my article to be like - very simple, not to many colours, but interesting due to varied colours, font sizes and shapes.

On the other 2 'writing' pages, the page is essentially filled with writing, all apart from in the middle in the page, where there is a quote. This is obviously one of the most interesting quotes from the page, and once again, is colour is varying. It has large red speech marks, the middle of the quote is red, with the start and end of the quote being black. Once again, this makes what is essentially a small bit of writing in the middle of a page full of writing, look like an interesting variant to the page. Also, every time a new subject is started in the writing, the start of the paragraph is emboldened and in capital letters.