Evaluation on my final production

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

The masthead of my magazine uses the common convention of large bold font, the colour scheme of the mastheads I looked at are a completely different colour scheme to mine which is something I should have followed. However, my colour choice of grey does make it seem more masculine but it can appeal to any gender because the other colours for my colour scheme keeps it gender neutral. The text I used is called Sandre and it is a very eye catching font that represents sound waves and this connects with music. I chose to follow this convention because it is popular in a lot of magazines specifically the music genre.

My masthead;

I used the convention of pull quotes in my article which was an interview, I used pull quotes because it emphasises what is said during the interview and they are eye catching and keep the page visually interesting and stops it from looking so busy and “wordy”. The font I used stands out from the rest of the text and also ties in with my colour scheme. I chose to use pull quotes because they are used a lot in magazines when there is an interview. I think it is an effective way to express certain aspects of the interview and it keeps the audience intrigued.

My pull quotes;

I used the common convention of drop caps in my interview because it breaks the text up and looks more visually interesting, many of the magazines I looked at used this in their article such as NME and Q. The drop cap is effective and I made mine reasonably big in size in order for it to stand out a lot. The drop cap is bolder and ties in with my colour scheme, it is simple yet very effective. I chose to follow this convention because it is popular in magazines especially in magazines of the music genre.

My drop cap;

Although I looked at magazines where the convention of cover lines were placed at the side of the image on the front cover I did, however, change mine to be coming across from each side but not covering too much of the image. The cover lines from the other magazines were all in the same colour scheme as the magazine which I also did. The cover lines were in a column on the magazines however, I made mine come from the side and be aligned to the left. I chose to differ from this common convention to make my magazine unique but I still stuck with using cover lines because it is a common thing for all magazines to do.

My cover lines;

When I was doing my research for my magazine I noticed that most of the images from double page spreads were group images and a lot of front cover images were portraits. I chose to follow the photography convention but I used group images the whole time because a lot of indie music is made from bands which is the genre of my music magazine. I used a variety of long shots and I did have one portrait as highlighted in blue. The magazines out on the shelves in shops tend to have photography that varies through mise en scene and costume and type of image shots. I chose to do mine just in the studio with the same models that were my band for the magazine, this was so that it was clear they were the main focus of the magazine, I also included one image of my own from a concert to keep the music genre flowing throughout the magazine. I tried to keep the images as close to indie band poses as I could do which took a lot of research, the variety of images throughout the magazine kept it interesting for the audience.

I used a plug on my front cover for my magazine. I used the common convention because it is very popular on a lot of magazines especially those of the music genre. The plug emphasises a specific subject of the magazine which I chose to use for my exclusive interview because it stands out more to the audience. The plug usually stands out a lot more on a magazine, it uses some of the colour scheme but usually uses a brighter colour or a colour that stands out more, I used the same colour as my colour scheme but made it a different font in order for it to stand out the most on the front cover.

I followed the common convention of a colour scheme in my magazine, this made the magazine look tidy and made the colours recognisable so that the audience would be able to relate these colours to my magazine, the colours are unisex colours if interpreted in the right way and I chose to use a colour scheme because a lot of popular music magazines have one and a lot of the colours are easily relatable to that specific magazine which is what I wanted to achieve for my magazine.