Draft Evaluation Question 1

1) In What ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products.

After looking at many real, mainstream magazines such as NME, Kerrang!, Q Magazine and Rock Sound. I found that they all stick to the typical conventions of music magazines, using the standard red, white and black colour palette, especially noticeable in 'Q'. This is what i wanted to stray from, so using a lot of blues in my colour palette allowed me to change direction from the average music magazine. I decided to reject this convention as it will allow my product to become unique and stand out from the crowd. With my magazine, I picked up a convention from NME magazine that I tried to imitate, this is with their use of putting a band name or solo artists' name at the top of the bottom third of the cover. This balances the cover out with the masthead. I like this method as it provides a much better insight into who is involved in the main article rather than using another cover line. So I used the band name 'Beneath The Waves' to show the readers exactly who was featured in this issue, instantly allowing them to make a decision on whether to purchase it or not, for example if they are big fans of a certain band, and they see the band name in a shop window, they will be instantly attracted to it and will most likely buy it. This is why I made the text so bold and big, to stand out. The genre of the real magazines was important in the creation of my magazine because I could easily base my product on a similar product with the same style and genre. (But of course breaking the conventions and adding my unique style). Looking at similar genres like Kerrang! For example, allowed me to see what kind of methods and visual aids are used to create the sense of a rock/garage genre. I decided that to acquire this style firstly the font was most important, using a messy font for my masthead allowed me to give off a 'not-so-serious' appeal to my magazine. Also the poses for my models in the photographs were important; like in my double page spread the model is doing quite a crazy pose with his hands in the air. This shows a rock and roll style and allows readers to match this up with the genre they want to read about.