Evaluation question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?


My music magazine does follow most of the conventions that you will see in today's magazines, I have tried to make it look as professional as I possible could through research of other magazines.

One of the main conventions of a music magazine is the masthead, this instantly identifies the magazine, and just by looking at the masthead you can immediately see the magazine type the target audience and the genre. With my masthead I wanted it to give off a classic feel, and really give people the thought of old school rock, I spent a while looking for a suitable font but this font looked really good and I was happy with the way it looked. It is very important to not over complicate your masthead as it needs to be easy to read and at the same time look good, the font i have used is called 'little Rickey nf' I chose this because it was clean and looked good whilst being very easy to read. One other main convention that music magazines tend to follow is that they will have a really eye catching colour scheme or house style, A lot of the time/in a lot of magazines, the house style uses red as it a very eye catching colour such as the rolling stone magazine, this is why I chose red as my house style, to capture the attention of the audience, also it stands out against the darker background.

Here is an example of an NME magazine using the red masthead against the black and white picture, similar to my magazine, it really catches your eye and looks really effective, I have found a lot of magazines use the colour red in their house theme. 

Another main convention that I have followed is the 'plus' sign seen on many front covers of magazines, as you can see in my magazine and the NME example I have got, both have a plus sign to show more content within the magazine, it makes the magazine look like there is a lot more going on and draws the reader in to want to find out more.

One convention that i have challenged in my magazine is the idea that most magazines have all there cover lines and lures in the same place or on one side of the magazine whilst I have them fairly spaced out and on each side of my front cover.

Here is another example of an NME magazine as an example, this shows how I have challenged magazine conventions, as you can see most the cover lines of this magazine are shown on the left side, I have some on both sides.

My main image on my magazine is in black and white with some colour, this makes it look moody and effective, this was the look I was going for with the whole moody looking band with the lighter, to show that they are rebellious, this effect is used a lot in magazines, to do this I used Adobe Photoshop cs5 and edited my image to look how I wanted, I did this with the Quick select tool and the image adjustment tool, I then modified it to look how I wanted.