EVALUATION Q1- IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

OWEN PRESCOTT

WAYS IN WHICH I USE CONVENTIONS

Existing MagazineMy Magazine

Bold Masthead at top of the page Bold Masthead at top of the page

Featured Artist’s Name Stands out Featured Person’s Name Stands outFeatured Articles to the left of the cover

Featured Articles to the left of the cover

Featured artists head partially covers up the masthead

Featured person’s head partially covers up the masthead

When creating my magazine I took a lot of inspiration from already existing magazine to help create a format that looked more stylish and professional. I used a lot of the same features most mainstream magazines use as I felt that if I made something completely unique that did not follow any conventions of a magazine it would look disorganised, unbalanced and overall less like a magazine and possibly more like a poster.

One of the main parts of this was having a large, bold masthead at the top of the page. This is important for a magazine as it is what sets your brand apart from the others and is one of the first things a person sees when they look at a magazine, meaning that it has to be one of the largest things on the page, and certainly the most prominent text on the page.

After the Masthead, the next most prominent feature of the cover is the featured artist on the cover. In all of my research I did not once come across a magazine cover that did not feature an artist, even more outlandish and individual magazines kept to this formant, most commonly displaying the artist in the middle of the page with the masthead at the top left of the page, although this was not always the case.

WAYS IN WHICH I DEVELOPED CONVENTIONS

The way I have decided to develop the conventions of a music magazine is by having a column across the side of the contents page. This is a feature in a lot of magazines, however in every case I found this was either to display the charts or has the contents featured inside. However I thought that it would be a good idea to have each featured artist’s name and where in the magazine they feature in the magazine. I did this because I know for a fact that not everyone will like every artist that is featured in the magazine and so having this, almost as a reference chart they can skip pages to find their desired artists if they so wish. It is also to make it more accessible if people might not have a lot of time to read he magazine, e.g. if they are on a commute to and from work, and so having this list will also help people to be able to read the most important parts to them without having to flick through every page to find each artist they are looking for, which will save them a lot of time they would have spent searching.

WAYS IN WHICH I CHALLENGED CONVENTIONS.

One common theme in most music magazine is that images of the artist tend to have a direct mode of address, as they are positioned towards and are look directly at the camera and the reader, however I decided to go against this and in almost every case have the subject of the photo looking away from the camera. This is to give it a sense of realism as they all look more as though they are going about daily business and as a result appear to be more relatable, which will make people want to buy the magazine if it is displaying people they feel they can relate with.

When creating the logo for my magazine, I went through a lot of other magazine logos, to see what worked well, what didn’t, what was lacking and what there was a lot of. I found that in a lot of cases the logo was simply the name of the magazine in white and in an ordinary font, often on a coloured background. I found one instance of there being a different colour in with the rest of the masthead. I tried this with my logo and found that putting the red, which is a bold and attractive colour, in-between two of the same letter, one of which had been mirrored, it made my magazine look much more notable than when it was all grey.