Color; Communicative Functions; Graphic design; Women’s magazines

Abstract

The analysis of the communicative functions of color becomes more necessary to the extent that its presence is widespread in all media. This paper works with high-level design magazines that have a regular periodicity. In this framework, it is possible to develop all the communication potential of this plastic element in high-end women’s publications.

The methodology used, content analysis, has allowed a comprehensive analysis of color in the scope of this study by capturing explicit variables (specifics for graphical representation). 35 particular subvariables from chromatic element, in more than 1200 pages, have been tested over a period of five years. Similarly, latent variables such as topic or journalistic genre were oriented to test the relationship with color. Complete results are related to the sector, as well as other particulars of each publication are highlighted. According to the period analysed, we performed a diachronic analysis to determine whether there are features that show both a stable trend or a progressive or regressive application.

In this study the relevance and versatility of the communicative contribution of color in the compositional plane is found, taking into account some of its connotative variants, its informative potential is confirmed and a categorization of the compositional functions is proposed.