Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your music magazine use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of existing music magazines?

In my magazine I tried to not necessarily come up with new ideas of things to put in/on a magazine, but to develop them, make them better, and more attractive to the audience. This not only saves time for me, as I dont have to try and create new things, but often I think people don't like change, so I tried to keep the roots of the conventional magazine. This was my front cover:

Other magazines of this music genre for example NME have a similar style, where they have a photo artist of band on the front cover, where the main coverline is about whoever is in the photos. The magazine will have its mast head across the top/top left. In my magazine I have followed these conventions, with the mast head and main coverline. A lot of magazines like NME however for their main image, have a long shot. I decided to go with a mid shot of my “artist” because I feel that it feels up a lot more of the page, and it will grab the audiences attention better on a shelf. My mast head itself is layered behind the head of the artist. This makes the artist stand out more than conventional magazines. If this was a real magazine, the company would want the mast head to stand out so people remember and want to buy another product, as I have layered it under the artist, I decided to make the font for the mast head itself have a drop shadow, and a outer glow to help it stand out. Not many magazines do this for their mastheads.

The colours I have used across my magazine are black and white mainly, with some greys. Besides the images. I have done this because the black and white contrast well with each other, and it makes the text easier to read for all potential readers and, it still looks very professional. And because I leave the pictures in colour, they stand out a lot more, it helps the reader see which articles he wants to read, and it brightens up the page a bit compared to the rather plain but classy black and white colours.

Below is my contents page:

In my contents page I tried to keep some of the conventions that a lot of magazines do, where they have a masthead/contents page in the same style at the top of the page, one main image, a smaller one, and the list of the contents of the magazine. I also included an “every month” which a lot of magazines do. I decided to change it up by putting a small review in my contents page, which is a preview for what is to come in the full review on another page. Along with a picture about the review. I often see contents pages crammed and crammed with pictures and text and it can be very disorientating. So I decided to be as minimal as I could be with the contents page, by putting less pictures, less text and less bright colours than most music magazines on their contents page, I have instantly made my magazine more “user friendly”. This is one of the ways I think my magazine, has developed most modern conventions. As you see with all media and technology now a days. Making interfaces/ media texts more user friendly is the big development at the moment. And I wanted to do that with my magazine.

Below is my double page spread:

I my double page spread I tried to stick to the normal conventions in that the article is on one side of the page and the main image for the article on the other side of the page. And then having my masthead but a lot smaller, next to my page number. I have used all the font in black as it keeps it looking professional and classy, and easy to read, compared to magazines that have black and yellow fonts which looks tacky. So I stuck to my black and white colour scheme. I didn't have any white font on my double page spread as it didn't go very well against the background, so to try and keep the white in the page, I put a white outer glow on some of the text to help keep with my colour scheme, and to help it look professional. Which is what I wanted to do because you see some magazines where everything is different colours and it just looks ridiculous. And yet again like a I said earlier, it isn't reader friendly and I wanted to make my magazine as reader friendly as possible. Not many magazines consider this anymore, they just try to cram as much as they can in your face.