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

The main conventions of music magazines are the bold, main masthead, one large image that covers the front cover and in some cases subheadings and smaller text to frame the rest of the cover. Simple primary colours are usually used as they do not contrast and they are less likely to make the magazine look overcrowded or too complex for the genre. Another convention when we look at this type of text is the fonts, capitalisation and the direction of the person in the image such as the way they are facing and eye contact. I believe I have kept many of these conventions because even though I wanted my magazine to have a different style to others, I still wanted to portray the Indie genre successfully without the audience becoming bored or tired with the way it looks and what it reads. Overall, the main image does include direct eye contact, it has a bold masthead that overpowers the remaining text and I have stuck to the primary colour red with slight use of black and yellow. My survey helped me a lot when deciding how to set out my cover. For example my survey told me not to include a border so I didn't because I wanted the style to be simplistic. Another problem was Much of my text used is placed around the edge of the cover so the border would have interrupted the text therefore making the overall design look scruffy and disorganised.

The four f's

Format: I have similar choices for my magazine as have seen before. For instance the large masthead, full image covering page, smaller subheadings, barcode and small details like the issue number. These all come together to model the magazine and make it more realistic.

Formula: For my double page spread I wrote an small article about one artist which is usually what you find in a music magazine as it focusses on their life story and music career. It also includes smaller images of them and maybe extra information for the reader such as tours or upcoming events to do with the person they're reading about.

Frame: I decided that I would not include margins or borders in my magazine as I didn't want the magazine looking overcrowded or complicated. However I wanted the design to flow a bit more and have a bit more freedom over the page rather than having a set design and places everything should go. If I was to make more issues, there would definitely be some consistencies set but they wouldn't all be identical because I believe keeping something different would keep audiences interest as they are looking or reading something that has changed.

Function: What my magazine is trying to achieve is to grab my audiences attention really with its ideas and overall make the readers entertained rather with the genre rather than becoming bored and switching to pop or rock which are overly popular.