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

Detailed at the end of my market research PowerPoint are a number of design conventions that I discovered magazines commonly use today. These include such things as the method of photography used for front covers (direct address, striking costume etc.), separating puffs and plugs into different thirds of the page, the eyecatching nature of numerical plugs and many more.

For the contents page, things like the division of contents by genre, featuring of editors notes, and the highlighting of the most important text in a different coloured font caught my eye.

And for the double page spread, I studied things such as how there was usually a lot of empty space on the page, how they used pull quotes and I learnt what a drop cap is.

I took all of these summary notes and applied them to my own magazine design. You can see how I have emulated the style of photography in direct address and genre-appropriate costumes on my front cover, how I featured my contents in the left third of its page and included an editor’s note, and how the double page spread was set out in columns, with dramatic pull quotes to draw the reader into the text and many more. I have included every convention listed at the end of said PowerPoint in my own work, and I believe that has helped me to create a convincingly real looking media product of my own.

Convention Development:- I have developed a strong sense of continuity between my pages by

keeping the focus on one artist in particular, and carrying fonts and colour scheme across pages (as well as, to an extent, page framing).

- I have capitalised on having genre-appropriate fonts and heavy links between graphic and photographic colour schemes to create a cohesive feeling magazine.

Challenging Conventions: - I feel that my exclusion of any other band from the three pages may be an

unusual design choice. I did this to contextually link the three pages together as I feel some magazines can feel very disjointed with their many subject matters.

- The way that my contents page photo utilises heavy motion blur is not often found in such magazines, but I think that it fits the page’s theme well, and is still clear enough to be understood by the reader.

- My magazine is quite short, but I did not think that the young audience would be dedicated to a longer publication so I chose to make it less expansive than products such as Q or Kerrang!