Evaluation activity 1

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of music magazines)

During my research I examined many highly recommended magazines that are designed and made by renowned creators journalists and designers who have great expertise in these fields. I have studied the most used conventions in the magazines to try and discover and gain in depth knowledge into how professional magazines used these conventions to promote and create an aesthetically pleasing magazine that would be deemed to be pleasing to the destined target audience. After intensive research into the conventions I came to a conclusion that the most common magazine layouts are in fact the "Z" and "F"
format the main best selling music magazines all tend to follow the same layouts week in week out an example of this would be NME who use the "F" format on the majority of there published front covers. The F format is a very popular format because it allows cover lines to run down the left side of the front cover and enables the magazine designer to make everything symmetrical i.e. the distance from the font to the border in a easier way.

The front cover I have adopted is based on the free newspaper music magazine Loud and Quiet This provided me with lots of inspiration for my magazine as it displayed lots of magazine conventions. The main example of this would be the use of white symmetrical gaps that Loud and quiet have adapted or made their on twist on. The magazine creator Christophe Brunnquell is seen to be responsible for changing the face and content of many modern day magazines as his work was based on the use of white spaces, and symmetry. Although Loud and Quiet is a free newspaper magazine It inspired me to change it and adapt it into a paid simplistic high end magazine of my own. 

The intensive research I did into several different magazines resorted in me adapting many magazine conventions the main magazines I focused on was NME, Loud and Quiet , CLASH as these are the magazines I taken a personal interest into and I found it easier to adapt and use the conventions from. For my contents there wasn't one magazine In particular I used and my research for conventions lead me to look at magazines that are not well known to the mass public and are more for the particular reader rather than the mass market an example of this would be dapper Dan. I loved the simplistic plain conventions he used along with the bold font. I decided that I didn't want my magazine to be completely plain this is why I adapted the style but know the complete contents as the convention that I really wanted to adapt from the Dapper Dan magazine was the way in which the titles of the extracts from the magazine were displayed as this fit in perfectly with the magazine I created. Another convention that my magazine used to adapt was the title of the contents page of MNE I developed this convention as I rather liked the fact that NME didn't call there contents page "contents page" I thought that the fact they used "Inside this week" was great because its not like the normal boring regular magazine and it also helps to establish the fact that it is a contents page, so by me using this in my magazine with a slightly different bolder font enabled me to make my contents page stand out.

For my double page spread the photography that I took of the band as Individuals was taken by adapting the famous conventions of photographer Martin Schoeller who is distinguished for his close up photos of just the face and shoulder the photographer who is famous around the world and based in LA was a definite for me to try and mirror image as I do like the work he has done and his conventions through photography. In comparison the photograph of the band together has been adapted from the conventions of the famous photographer Terry Richardson  as he is known for his rather out there photos with famous celebrities in rather strange poses but the way I have adapted his convention is that I have used a close up Image of my band The Claptons doing a strange pose rather than a long shot that Terry Richardson commonly does. The text layout relating to the columns and placement of text came from a convention of Karrang which listed its interviews in 3 columns with the questions being of a different colour to the answers, although I am aware that karrang isn't really an indie magazine I decided to adapt this convention as I believed it would provide me with a clear layout for my indie magazine. By looking at other magazines that fit in with my target audience of Indie Scencesters I was able to develop an original looking magazine with developed conventions from many other magazines.