Evaluation - Question 1

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

Preliminary Task:

My preliminary task was to design the front page and contents of a new school magazine, and to do this I needed to look at actual school magazines to see what the forms and conventions of them were.

Looking at Newsman school magazine's front cover, I notice that they have included their school logo/badge/motto in the top right hand corner to give the magazine its identity if the masthead is not actually the name of the school, like mine isn't.

The background of the magazine is entirely taken up by the montage of photos, and idea that I have tried to incorporate into my magazine, but I have only used the one photo, and edited it using the history brush tool so that only Claire is in colour. This makes it easier to put on cover lines that can be easily read. The actual school magazine uses a plain coloured bubble over the photos so that the cover lines can be put there, which I have vaguely used when I wrote over the plain paper that Claire is holding "College? Work? Uni?"

Main Task:

Looking at the NME masthead, I have drawn a lot of inspiration for my own magazine masthead.

I saw that the use of the colour red works well in the NME masthead as it is very eye-catching and will work to attract the attention of passing potential buyers. I have also used the drop shadowing so it now has a 3D dimension and jumps off of the page. Looking at the design and colour scheme, my aim is that people would instantly know what magazine it is just by glancing at the page, like people do with NME magazine, so that my magazine has its own brand identity.

Also, NME magazine masthead's typeface is quite smooth and simple, which kind of reflects the type of music the magazine represents (the music which is popular at the time, the magazine changes its focus every so often). Because my music magazine is based entirely on the indie/alternative genre, my typeface for the masthead needed to be slightly edgier to represent the sound of this music scene, something similar to the Kerrang! masthead.

Kerrang! magazine's genre is the rock music scene, and I think the masthead perfectly represents that, by using an edgier typeface which has slashes throughout it. They also only use one colour, black, which is often associated with rock music.

I combined the features from both of these magazines to create my magazines masthead, using the red colouring and drop shadowing from NME, and the idea of a ripped, jagged typeface to represent my music genre from Kerrang!.

This article stamp is taken from Q magazine.

I really did like the use of the Union Jack flag on the Q magazine stamp as it promotes what the article is about 'The 50 Best British Albums' and it acts as a hook, as the reader will already have an idea of what the article will be about before they read the text so will be intrigued to read the rest of the article. The flag also parallels with what the article is about - 'British Albums' - an idea that I have carried over to my magazine with an article about '100 UK Gigs Listed!'.

When I was analysing NME magazine, I noticed that down the side of the front cover, there were song lyrics from a recent pop song, in this case it was Empire State of Mind - Jay Z feat. Alicia Keys, and I thought that this was a really clever idea, as real music fans will recognise and be able to tell what song they were from. My magazine is aimed at real music fans, so I decided take this element and use it on my front cover, by using lyrics from The Captain - Biffy Clyro, the genre of music that my magazine's target market will be interested in.

Now I need to look at the overall layout of real magazine front covers to compare it to mine.

The first thing that I notice about both of these magazine front covers is that they extract colours from the main photo and then transfer them into the text for the cover lines. I have done this on my front cover by taking the blue from Scarlet's eyes and coat, and the red from her t-shirt and transferring them onto my Union Jack flag and the cover lines surrounding the photo.

The theme of using the colours of the Union Jack not only fits perfectly with the article about '100 UK Gigs Listed!', it also slots into my double page spread article about Scarlet, because in the article I mention that she is the 'self proclaimed new front woman of British music'. Even in the main photo on my double page spread I specifically made sure that Scarlet was holding a cushion that is emblazoned with the Union Jack flag. There is a running colour scheme that I have used throughout my 3 pieces of work, to maintain the magazine's house style and follow the British theme.

Next I need to look at comparing my contents page to other real magazine's contents pages.

One of the first things that I noticed when looking at NME magazine and Q magazine's contents pages is that both of them have got the masthead at the top of the page, usually accompanied by something like: In this issue, This week, This month etc.. which I have done on my magazine's contents page.

The NME contents has included a band index down the side of the page, an idea that I find to be extremly useful to the reader as it tells them alphabetically, at a glance, who will be in this issue so they can easily search down the list and see if there favourite artist/band is there.

Both NME and Q magazines' contents have used different headings to separate the articles in terms of news, features, reviews etc. which I have done on my contents page by spearting it into 2 headings: On The Cover and Featured Inside.

On this double page spread that I was looking at I saw that the header, or the biggest bit of text pn the page, is a quote from the interview below. This gives the reader a taste of what is to come in the article, and helps them make up their mind about whether to read the article or not.

I have used this element in my double page spread by having my header as "All publicity's good publicity, isn't it?" I like this quote because it's quite cheeky and sarcastic, and I think that if you were reading it, you would want to read on and know what publicity that they are talking about. It also involves the reader by asking them a question, making the magazine seem friendly and personable.

This double page spread is from NME magazine and when I started to look at it, and other double page spreads, to look at the forms and conventions of them, I noticed that the vast majority of them use quotations from the interview to interject into the article. This gives the reader a sense of what the next part of the interview is going to contain.

This is part of my double page spread article, with interwoven quotations.