Evaluation Question 1

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

Front Cover

At the top of my magazine cover is a cover line with a big masthead next to it. I have chosen to name my magazine BeatZ because the Beat part represents the genre of music my magazine is aimed at and the Z just make it stand out and goes against the conventions . I decided to make the name relate to the genre because it makes people remember it easier i always find the magazines with names relating to the subject help me remember them . The masthead gives the audiences an idea what magazine it is and hints of what it is about. The dress code i used on my front cover was a fashionable young look with designer labels as i believe these are the kinds of thing the target audience would be wearing.

Breaking conventions can either go really well or really badly however if you make it to unconventional your making the magazine for you and not for your target audience.

Contents

The contents page of my magazine is quite plain and crisp with lots of white space however it is very effective as the white space makes you concentrate more on whats important . I added a some graphical images which makes the whole page feel more photoshopped and more stylish. I have also made everything look crisp by spacing everything out and not clumping it together.

Double Page Spread

My Double Page spread is fairly unconventional as a lot of the page is just plane white with a big image.I chose for my model to do a god like pose as when researching designer brands websites all the models seemed to be doing objective gazes and being to cool to be standing casually.

In the mainstream music magazine industry there is always a structure in which it goes in to stick to the conventions here are as follows:

• Information Architecture – This is the idea that everything is ordered according to importance and relevance. Content such as heading titles and the 1st paragraph is placed above over secondary content such as pagination.



• Purpose of object - The size and colour of any piece of content is determined for its purpose. This is different to the idea that when something is bigger it receives more attention. There is no fool-proof formula to decide a hierarchy, as influences are arbitrary.



• Variety - Each page within a magazine usually consists of a ratio of text to images. This ratio is typically similar throughout the entire magazine (Continued in my next point) but fluctuates in correspondence to the page content. For instance DPS on artists are more like to have a higher text ratio compared to a page on fashion.



• Balance – Throughout the magazine there is a current theme in terms of design, shape, layout & colour. This typically follows the magazine title & cover.

My target audience are fairly non mainstream so i have to add little non conventional pieces to my magazine, Throughout my magazine i have used quite a lot of blank spacing to make it fairly plain and simple which i believe makes the whole magazine look more crisp and i wanted it to look very graphical hence why i did lots of different box designs. Cut of boxes are used throughout the magazine as i think they stand out and are useful for adding information into.