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

The media product that I have produced uses develops and challenges the forms and conventions of a real media project in many different ways. I firstly decided to decide on a suitable colour pallet that would work well with the genre that I have chosen for the magazine, which is hip hop. I decided on red, black and white, I did this because this is a common colour scheme for this genre of magazine. I felt that the chosen colour pallet allowed for the magazine to look very professional, as well as this I wanted the magazine to be instantly recognisable to its target audience, as well as not allowing the colours to clash but rather stand out on the page and I believe that the colour pallet I chose allowed it to do just that.
When creating the front cover of the magazine I decided that I would follow the typical conventions of the structure and layouts of a front cover from a well-known music magazine, Billboard, the main reason was because I didn’t want the magazine to look cluttered and complicated. I felt that this was important because if I had have made the front cover look cluttered, the magazine may have been mistaken for another genre such as rock and Kerrang for example, because that is a typical convention of that genre of magazine. The font of the magazine is something that I also felt was important to the magazine, the font that I decided to use was LilyUPC, I chose this because it is very clear and it stood out on the page, I also felt that it was quite simplistic and fitted in perfectly with the genre of my magazine, this was a convention that I followed all the way through my magazine, so that it looked professional and it all flowed properly. I put all of the important information regarding features within the magazine down the left hand side of the front cover and then the important information regarding the feature article over the top of the main image in the centre of the page, I did this in a larger font size because this is the main feature of the magazine so it needs to stand out on the front cover otherwise people may not buy the magazine. Something where I feel that I didn’t follow the typical conventions of a music magazine was with the image that I used, I decided that I would go for  a fully body shot of the two artist that would appear in my feature article, this is instead of the typical convention of using a close up shots of them both. I felt that this worked better because of the fact that the feature article is about two artists instead of one, if I had decided to do it about one person I would have done a close-up shot in order to fill the front cover but as I decided to do a two artist feature article, it would have been impossible to fit two close up shots of them both on the front cover. I wanted to do this because it allows the audience to see the mise en scene of costumes that the two artists are wearing, as I feel that this is important to show the genre of the magazine further. The artists are posing together and are both looking towards the camera, which not only forms a personal relationship with each other but also provides a direct address to the audience, providing a reason for them to buy the magazine. Again this is a typical convention of this genre of music magazine and is also apparent on the style model that I used which was Billboard. Billboard has a very unique style and although I did take ideas from the magazine, I didn’t want to copy the style as it is very unique to that particular magazine. I feel that my magazine is quite traditional in regards to the layout and its simplicity. One thing that I decided not to do, even though it was on all of the style models that I looked at, was not to allow for the artists on the front cover to cover the masthead, the reason for this is because magazines such as Billboard and Kerrang can do this because they are well known, whereas my magazine will not be known to its audience yet. The final convention that I followed was to put the artist’s information in red and the text regarding the artist in white, this was so the artists name would stand out on the shelf in a shop surrounded by other magazines of a similar genre; this is something that again flows throughout the magazine, which reinforces my house style. I found the contents page the most difficult part of the project; it was inspired by a few different magazines such as Billboard, NME and Vibe. With the images I decided to go for three medium shots as this is a common feature on magazine contents pages rather than have a full image of just one person, using the medium shot allows me to have three images on the contents page. For this however I challenged the convention of direct address to the audience as none of the three artists are actually looking directly at the audience. I did this to create a little bit of mystery surrounding the artists on the page. Things on the contents page such as ‘features’ etc. are all things that I used from looking at my style model which was NME, as well as the ‘IMPACT this week’ coming from that magazine as well. I decided that I would put the important information such as artist names in different colours to the rest of the text.   

I decided to do the feature article as two double page spreads, one double page focusing on one artist and the other focusing on the other artist. I did both of these in the same style to each other so that they flowed well. I followed the conventional layout of any normal music magazine, but the style model that I used was Vibe for my feature article. I structured the piece as a Q&A which may not be conventional but I felt that it worked well with the type of feature article that I was hoping to create. I also decided to pull quotes out of the text and make them a feature on the page so that people would flick to the page in the shop, see the quotes and then hopefully buy the magazine. I also decided to have an image dominating a page as I felt that this would allow the artist to stand out.