In what ways does your product

use, develop or challenge

forms and conventions of real

media products?

Introduction.

Within my magazine I have used certain conventions to make my magazine as realistic as possible. To start with, I have used the basics for my front cover. Firstly, I have used a mast head predominately located at the top center of the page, bold and big in black. I have used a cove image of a teenage girl, representing the type of target audience who would buy the magazine. Also included is the main headline, noticeable bigger to emphasise the importance of the head story, and also smaller headlines covering the issues in the magazine. Other techniques used are annotated next.

Tag line

Main Image

Main head

line

Barcode

Date and

issue

number

Mast

Head

Puff

Smaller

head

lines

Banner

The title of my magazine

The title of a magazine is significant to indicate what type of magazine it is and what kind of

genre it will be about. For example the title

‘Kerrang!’ first indicates that this is an electric

guitars strum, and so readers can firstly analyse

that this is a heavy music magazine, perhaps rock. My magazine, named ‘Inferno’ indicates

warmth and fire, and so readers can discover my

magazine is hot for news and gossip, and very

open and straight forward to news.

Mise-en-sense of images.

For the front cover I have used a plain white background so the cover girl stands out. The use

of her being pale and in fresh, new colours can

reflect to the story of her come back and

becoming a better fresher person. She is also

smiling and looking natural, so quite simply she is looking in a natural state and that the issue is on

a happy, positive story, and therefore an

audience will be reluctant to see her life

changed and what her successes are.

Font

Taking a look at Kerrang! (A rock magazine) and NME (An indie-rock magazine) and basing my

magazine around these musical genres, I took

into consideration how their fonts are bold and

outstanding in dark colours, commonly black,

white and/or red, and so therefore I took this into consideration and styled my title in a bold black

and big thick letters.

Written content

The front covers written content is usually kept to a minimal so that the audience are draw to and

concentrating to the image and main story line.

The less the text, the more neater the page also

can look and it looks a lot less clustered and

busy. I have also adopted to many music magazine conventional features by putting some

text in a banner and a puff to stand out the key

stories, especially some of the shocking storys

inside.

Musical genre

The musical genre is evident on every NME cover. This is because it sticks to all stories within the

same musical genre: indie-rock. The main image

and cover line, and separate smaller headlines

all link to an indie-rock artist or story. From this, I

attempted to do similar by using artists such as Jake Bugg and Beady Eye who are both

indie/rock artists to be featured on my indie/rock

magazine.

Here this is evident:

All

familiar

indie/ro

ck artists

Contents

I based my contents page around an NME contents as I liked the layout and detail. I liked the ideas of:

The title/layout the the contents page

The contents lay out sections

The way the main story was central with an image

The artist index

The ‘subscribe now’ box

Contents

The contents basically explains what is included in the issue so therefore it was important to

include indie/rock artists names, the main ocver

girl and her image, and also the page number to

each story.

The contents has to be clear as easily to follow for the reader to easily navigate themselves

around the magazine. Therefore I still stuck to my

colour scheme from the cover page of black,

white, red and yellow and it makes the text clear and easy to read.

Overall Looking at my front cover, contents and double

page spread, I think that my magazine successfully use conventions of real media products, such as real music magazines with similar music genres. I feel like my conventions developed the conventions seeing as I based my magazine conventions from NME and Kerrang! Issues but broadened the effects by changing the font, style and sizes to make them more effective and for them to stand out better with also different colourschemes. This challenged my conventions to see if they could also be successful, however from looking at my finished product, I feel like my magazine looked really good with its realistic conventions, layouts and forms.