Evaluation 1

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

As you can see my magazine cover doesn’t have many of the conventions that you would see on a regular magazine. This is because unlike regular magazines mine is a specialist magazine which focuses on one band or artist per issue.

This cover is for an indie-rock artist and therefore I have built up my magazine to make it look as individual as possible. By using a white filter as a base colour on my image I could enhance the eye colour making them a bright blue colour that links with the text used. I have also blurred around the face making it look softer and they eyes more prominent. This entices the reader as it is different and something that isn’t used with every magazine.

As my magazine is a specialist issue it challenges to normal conventions by not using many. For example, I don’t use pull lines on the front covers, this is because all the stories relate to one artist and the reader already knows this. I don’t completely throw the idea of conventions out of the window though. I do have common conventions such as a tag line and barcode.

The mast head on my magazine is very similar to the ‘MOJO’ style model I was using, this is because I thought that technique was very impressive and I applied it to my own masthead ‘AURA’. The masthead of my magazine is central, similar to MOJO. During my research I found that magazines like ‘Q’ and ‘NME’ have their masthead/logo in the top left corner. I personally didn’t like this idea as I found it repetitive, especially is the logo is there on each page. 

The layout of my magazine cover photo was extremely important as I took inspiration from the ‘MOJO’ cover and in some aspects I have mimicked it. For example the tagline and main cover line are both placed at the bottom of the page. This is because of the close up image of the models face— if the text was in the centre of the page it would block out certain aspects and draw the attention away from the eyes, which is where I wanted it to be.

 

My contents page was also modeled from a ‘MOJO’ magazine but not the same issue. As you can see this contents page contains Florence Welsh (left) . I have adapted my contents page to match its format and have tried to get the layout at an equal balance. (right). Compared to each other they are very similar, despite the changes in font and colour. I kept the contents page relatively simple because from my research I have found that simplicity the best. I made sure it had a clear and logical structure. I tried my best to make sure all the text was formatted correctly.  The image used on the contents is the same model as before as the magazine is all about her. The house colours flow throughout the magazine, which makes the magazine, seem more professional.

My double-page really challenges the conventions as its is not set out the usual way. For example, compares to this NME DPS mine looks completely different. Which was what I was aiming for in a way but i also think it makes it look a little less professional.  I used pull lines from certain answers as quotes to highlight them.

The written content in my magazine was very important to me and i wanted to make sure it was qualitative but also not to much of it that the reader would get bored. I thought that it was very simple to write an question and answer article because I thought of both questions and answers. 

The genre of my magazine was indie-rock music which is one of my favourite styles of music which means I was very aware of what it entitled. I knew the type of images and colour scheme that would compliment the genre well. I looked at magazines such as rock sound and q, along with mojo. They all gave me basic ideas of what I wanted for my magazine and I specifically decided to challenge the conventions by creating a specialist magazine.