Like other music-led magazines, Hot Press has a distinctive visual style that has evolved gradually over the life of the publication. For example, its pages contain a lot of text, pictures used on non-colour pages are very black and the balance of text and photos is at least 50-50. "The importance of photos has changed in the sense that, with computers, you can do so much more with visuals," says Paula Nolan, art editor of Hot Press. "Now we can scan photos into the computer and distort them, for example."

The use of highly contrasting black and white pictures is a deliberate decision. "It just has more of an artistic look about it," she says. "I personally prefer the look of it. I think grey tones are very indistinct." The style of the photos is also a result of the limitations of newsprint paper. Newsprint is similar to the paper used to produce The Irish Times and forms the bulk of the pages in Hot Press. Photos which are washed out or grey lose their impact on newsprint paper, so one way to avoid this is to increase contrast in black and white pictures.

Hot Press uses original photos commissioned from photographers for interviews and major articles, though it also uses promotional pictures provided by record companies, and its photo library fills more than 28 filing cabinet drawers. Hot Press is laid out entirely on computer. Articles, known as copy, are usually presented to a typesetter on disk or by email. The text is formatted into the particular typefaces and column widths used by the magazine. Then it is returned to the sub-editors or journalists who decide on a headline and sub-headline - the text under the headline explaining the content of the article - for the piece. The layout of the page then becomes the responsibility of the art director.

Glossy colour pages are very expensive to produce, so Hot Press only uses glossy pages when advertisers indicate that they want their ad to appear on such a page. If there is any space left over after the ad has been laid down, Hot Press may use the remaining space for one of its own articles.

The cover of Hot Press is always printed on gloss paper. Look at the back cover and inside cover pages of Hot Press and you'll find that there are glossy ads - often for cigarettes, as it happens - on the same pages as text and articles. In effect, the advertiser's money has enabled the magazine to produce a glossy cover.