Evaluation Question 1

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

On my front cover of my magazine, I have mostly avoided breaking many conventions, this made the actual creation of my magazine relatively easy as the conventional products available on the market were available for reference and as a basis to being building from which allowed my magazine to fit the conventions already in place.

To begin with, a large masthead, one that filled around a sixth of the page was a convention I adhered to, I felt this was important as it allows the masthead to be easily recognisable and as I used white as the colour, I feel that the colour allows it to stand out significantly and look not only effective but look like something professional that you would see conventionally on a magazine in a store.

For the most part, across my whole magazine, I used the colours black, white, gold and red. The use of these colours across all three pages allows synergy to be created and draws the whole thing together as a product. These colours and the background of my cover image allowed the use of bold straplines and subheadings for the articles on my cover. They stand out and the use of the brighter colours in contrast to the black and white allow the coloured parts to draw the readers eye.

For my cover, one convention I challenged that is found across both the vintage and rock genres, is the use of a large amount of feature articles swarming the cover. For my cover, I have included 3 articles, this is a large conventional challenge, however, my target audience requested a clear cover for the most part and I feel that it works effectively to mark the importance of the main articles in the magazine, hence why I chose to break this convention.







Another convention I chose to manipulate was that of adding a reasonable number of puffs to the cover, the usual for the genres I chose is around 3 to 4, whereas I only included one. The colour is very bright and the circular shape draws attention to it, engaging the reader.





A convention I kept was the location of my pugs, the barcode, date, price and issue can all be found in a place that it usual of any type of magazine. I kept these features the same as I feel they work well as they are.


Two more conventions I kept were using a studio shot as my cover image and using a small banner to advertise social media accounts. I kept the main image as a studio shot as I feel the lighting is good and the background for my image, also the artist looking into camera is a code for these images that I adhered to in an attempt to address the audience and create a sense of synthetic personalisation.




Finally I kept the costume more stereotypical of the rock genre, the makeup is dark around the eyes, there is stomach on show, a racy attitude suggested by the genre, but the checkered shirt is a more modern rock image, which I included in order to link to the text where it talks about bringing rock music back.

On my contents page I have tried to include a variety of fonts, as this can commonly be seen in usually vintage magazines. In this case I have used the different fonts to represent a new part of the contents page or the articles. I have used the same colours as my front cover to tie the pages together.

On this page I have used two puffs, one circular and the other a jagged edge star, both are coloured gold to make them stand out from the page and also to ensure that the text inside easily readable.

I have again accentuated with brighter colours across the page and included a large amount of articles. A more unusual convention I decided to try was the vintage one of using lines instead of boxes to separate the sub-headings and articles. I feel that this makes a really nice geometric feel to the final piece and I am glad that I tried it, as I feel it look effective.


One large convention I broke was that of which the images were not all studio shots, that some of them were live shots and also a location shot to
break up the images being all studio shots. After researching multiple magazines myself, I thought that magazines with all studio shots looked less effective and boring in comparison to those which included other shots.

I have also conventionally included a banner along the top of the page, and the name and website address in a small box to themselves below that. These allow features to be more readable and keeping it relevant to the audience.

Finally the convention I really challenged was the one of having props in my photos. When taking an image with props, it changes the manor and the focus of the image, and I chose not to include them to keep the focus on the face and the makeup or outfits of my models.

On my DPS, there are very few conventions changed, for example, the only major one is the fact that I have used another image that is not a frontal image or a portrait shot. I chose to break this as i felt that the image worked well with the story in my DPS. The image could be interpreted by my TA as looking off into the future or looking towards the light at the end of the tunnel, and the TA feedback from the A2 media class have all said this image is the most effective shot in my pages. Aside from this, the only convention I have slightly manipulated is that of having an image for a DPS take up one side of A4, I have only used about half of the page, including the flowered borders I added to fill the space.

For the most part, I feel I have adhered to conventions, especially with the 3 pull quotes I have chosen to include. These quotes were chosen from the text as I feel that they represent the image I wanted to create for the artist, showing that Dyer can be applied in many situations as I have created a star image, not the image of a real person - even if the image I created was of someone grounded and down-to-earth.

The magazine name and website address and colour schemes have both been included on to this page, these allow synergy between the multiple pages of the magazine.

I have used mainly black and white but I used a significant amount of red to accentuate important features, like the title.

Alongside this, the black and white photo reflects the vintage genre significantly and the past and the music industry. However, having the photograph in black and white allows an effective background for the gold colour of the pull quote. The colour also brings the synergy back around and ties the page as a whole together, but also the three pages I have created.

Overall, I think I mostly adhered to conventions and where I broke them I feel as though I have used them effectively to make a good media product, but the genre's I chose made it rather easy to create the product, however I also feel that convention can limit you, as Hartley says, as it restricts the creative freedom you can have with the magazine. However, I also agree with Neale in saying that some conventions needed to be repeated in order to anchor the genre, but they can be manipulated into anything to distort and change the meaning.