When comparing my front cover to an existing publication I am able to analyse how mine likens to an already successful music magazine. I have obviously looked at a different number of front covers of a large variety of music magazines, but I have chosen to compare mine with Q and NME. Although both of these are aimed at a slightly older target audience than mine, I believe they represent my genre in the best way. Something I have noticed is that my magazine along with the other 2 magazines display the model slightly covering the title of the magazine while the background remains behind it. This is used hugely in the magazine industry therefore is a convention I decided to stick to. A different between my magazine and existing ones is that the background of my image is not a block colour. Unlike the cover of NME and Q. I was originally going to cut around the model and replace the background with one colour, however when I created this it did not look as I expected it to (it is shown on my blog as one of my drafts). Therefore I decided to challenge this convention and keep the original background of the image in place and I am happy with the result. The covers of NME and Q both display the main headline to the side one side of the page, this is something I wished to reflect in my magazine. This is because it seemed to work best with my image. Also the name of the cover model is the largest thing and most eye catching writing on the page, which is something I believe I have established on my front cover. Another convention I appear to have mirrored is the variety of fonts and font sizes to draw attention to certain words on the page. Lastly front covers generally have a 4 part colour scheme that will slightly contrast one another for example in Q the yellow and pink contrast, this is something I have used on my front cover. I have used orange, blue, white and black with the orange and blue contrasting.

Out of the existing contents pages I had looked at I was most drawn to Q’s contents page. Obviously the target audience of that magazine is higher than what I expect mine to be, however the page is well structured and I really like the way it is displayed. The images are placed carefully unlike the way a pop magazine would structure their images. Also in my opinion younger people are beginning to like an older look, and the layout of a Top of the Pops contents page would be aimed at a much younger audience than mine. Firstly the use of imagery is quite key on the contents page as no one wants to be too bored by a lot of writing and similar to Q contents page I matched the images with a description on the page. A difference between my contents page and Q’s is that I included a column that included a list of other things/people that were included. I did this as it makes the magazine seem like it is full of new and exciting things but doesn’t bore the audience with too much detail. When looking at Q contents page it reminds the audience once again that the title of the magazine is ‘Q’ however I had looked at other contents pages and they didn’t refer to the title, so I had to decide which I felt conveyed the audience more suitably. I then decided to use the title of the magazine on the contents page as it reinforces the magazine they are reading and also explicitly states that it is the content of this particular magazine, which I believe makes the content look like it is exclusive to tat magazine. I displayed the page numbers in a very similar way to how Q had because I found it a very effective and clear way to tell the audience what page they need to go to for this information.

I decided the best designed double page spreads for my target audience would be Q, because although the audience is slightly older I can still make my magazine look younger by changing the content in the article. I particularly like this Emeli Sande article as I like the structure; this is something I wished to reflect in my article. I think I have followed this structure well. Something I noticed was conventional to articles was that the title always covered a large amount of the page. This is something I have done on my magazine as I liked how eye catching it made the title. I made the first letter font different to the rest as I like the way it varied the page. This is something that not a lot of article will do, but is something that works for my target group and reflects the soft information in the article. Although I really like the content of this article, I thought it would be more effective if the text was more light hearted. The question and answer layout of my double page spread is something that is very conventional to most interviews with artists as it structures the text in a way that they audience can see the difference between the question and their reply. The question asked had to be about her career and the release of a new single as this is a reason artists have interviews with magazines, however I felt they could move away from her career and edge towards her personal life as it would make the audience fell as though they are getting personal information. I have added something that not a lot of music magazines seem to do, a added section for fan questions. I felt this would be best laid out on the image in a box over. I like this as it makes the structure of the article look a little less strict than the Q example, I think this fits well with my target audience. This is because they are still quite young, but do not like thing really randomly placed and layered everywhere on the page.