Evaluation - Question 1

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

For my media product I aimed to try to get as many of the typical conventions from rock magazines as possible, especially in my front cover and my contents page. My front cover has a lot of attention grabbing point such as for example the giveaways and the free posters that I featured.

Since my magazine was aimed at the rock genre I aimed to get a grey scale and dark colour scheme a long with bright reds and yellows, the reason I mainly used these colours is because I know that they're very popular with rock magazines and this is because they're contrasting and so therefore allow my magazine to stand out easier. Also there's proof that these colours work well because if you look at magazines such as Kerrang and NME you can see that they stand out clearly as the colours are very contrasting, both to the image and the background colour. This is key if you are wanting your magazine to stand out to your audiences in shops and stands.

As you can see from my magazine I have aimed to try and recreate the colour scheme, however I went for a darker background as opposed to a lighter background. I feel like mine works better as with darker colours it allows for more contrasting when using bright colours with, in my case, the Reading tickets sticker and the extra bands footer bar. As well as using red on the footer bar I have also separated each of the bands and musicians with a white slash as it contrasts from the black text, this makes it easier read for the audience. Also one of the key conventions in magazines are that the main photo must overlay the masthead, this is done to show a higher status for the band, actor or model on the front cover. Overall I feel like I kept closely to the conventions on my front cover.

In my contents page I decided to also keep close to the conventions as I felt like it would work better than if I were to move away from them. The entire page has not much blank space and even though there's a little bit at the top I feel like this works well and compliments the entire page. There is a lot of information in the contents and all of them are numbered, also I have made sure that they're all in a nice list style so that it makes it easier for readers to follow along and find the page that they want. I made sure that I only use one photo as it lets the audience know what the main point of this magazine is, this therefore compliments the front cover with the band on there. As you can see I have also continued my contrasting colour scheme in order to keep my magazine eye catching.

For my double page spread I decided to change up my colour scheme a little and keep the entire page in a grey-scale theme apart from the image itself, which although I have desaturated, I haven't completely made black and white. However I have continued to stick with conventions and not stray too far from them. For my article title I ensured that it was an opposing colour to the background, the reason I did this was to once again create a contrasting style which allows for easier readability, this is important as you will want your audience to be interested in the story.

Although this page does have a bit of blank space in the top right I feel like it needed it otherwise it would've felt over filled and looked messy. I also ensured to keep my page numbers in the same place as my contents page as this will make it look more professional. The quote I used 'That's how you get over failure' was a very important choice as it is something that everyone wants to know and so therefore this gets the audience to read through the article. Also I used light grey boxes around my questions to make them stand out and make it easier to understand for the reader, to aid this I also used a drop capital at the start of my article which is a typical convention of magazines and so is important for a reader to know where to start.

Now over all three sections of my music magazine I believe that I have adapted to fit the typical conventions of such music magazines and have therefore made something that I believe is good and that I am proud of. Everything throughout is consistent and the article is rather interesting.