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

FRONT COVER 
I would say that my magazine front cover altogether conforms to the conventions of a real professionally finished front cover. I have tried to include everything that would be found on a real magazine, pulling different things from different front covers I have looked at. Maybe a professional magazine cover may not have included every single detail I have on mine but I tried to include everything I could to make it look authentic. The main image is centred in the middle of the page and so gives a clear indication of what the main story in the magazine is; with pull quotes and titles to accompany it. I chose to have only one subsidury image on my front cover. On most magazines I looked at they mostly all had subsidury images, but as I tried with mine they didn't have many that cluttered up the page, so I chose just to have one because any more I think would have made the main image seem less important and would've resulted in the magazine looking messy. With including more text and sell lines than images I feel I have avoided clutter whilst still managing to capture the reader's attention.

Unlike many magazines I have looked at however the image on my front cover does not obscure the masthead. I decided to leave my masthead unobscured because my magazine is not a recognised magazine, and so I needed my masthead to be fully visible to the reader so it would grab their attention.


With my magazine I also tried to stick with a main colour scheme. On numerous magazine's I have looked at they generally stick to a specific colour scheme, and so I attempted to replicate that with mine. My colour scheme being mainly black and gold with patches of red.



With regard to more minor details on my magazine cover I tried to conform to conventions of real magazines. I included a bar code on the bottom right of my magazine which is similar to many magazines. I have included the date and my magazines website address also but unlike the magazines I have show on the left, I chose to have the date underneath my masthead and the website address next to the bar code.  I again conformed to real music magazines by including a bar at the bottom of my magazine with a list of important bands that feature in it. This is in place to attract those readers who aren't that interested in the main article, and also as just another promotional device. This is used by many magazines (in particular Kerrang)

Contents page

With my contents page I thought it would be best to be as conventional as possible, due to the fact that I thought it would be easiest to use. I took inspiration from NME about the band finder on the side of the page that lists all of the bands that I include in my magazine.The layout is fairly simple and contains four images. Contents pages I looked at varied in the amount of images they contained but the ones preferred and seemed the most professional were the ones that kept things quite minimal.








    Double page

With my double page I chose to have my main headings to take up two pages, which I took from looking at certain professional double pages. I thought it suited my double page like that because it kind of represents my characters different personalities. I modelled my picture on a double page article that my teacher showed me in class, except mine only has one person on compared with the one I looked at which a group. I like the idea of the picture being the background for the writing and it kind of emphasises the fact my character is starting something on his own without a band.