Evaluation- Questions One

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

There are many elements to my product that convey generic conventions of existing music magazines, in order to make my product authentic i researched current magazines such as ‘Q Magazine’ and many others to pick out reoccurring features. 

Firstly i believe that my product fits the conventions of music magazine and i have achieved a realistic product, one of the ways i have done this is by including consistent branding throughout. I have branded my product by using the masthead on the contents page and on the double page spreads, this keeps consistency and makes a clear connection between the cover, contents page and double page spread. In addition to using the mast head to brand my product i have also used a colour scheme to create another visual link between the three separate pages, this is very conventional of magazines to choose three colours and present these across the magazine, for me i choose the colours red, grey white and mustard. 

In addition to this i included smaller elements that are conventionally found on music magazines such as barcodes, issue numbers, dates, review sections and a price along side the barcode. 

For the barcode i have positioned it and sized it so that it is large enough to see however placed it in the bottom right hand corner, this is the least significant section on the left side third rule and is where bar codes are stereotypically found as they do not detract from the main features being advertised. 

The price i have opted to put my product at is a reasonable price and fits within the general range that music magazines sell for, i have lowered the price slightly due to this magazine being a less established one making this feature conventional of new music magazines.

To ensure that my product is includes all of the re occurring conventions on magazines i have included a date, almost all magazines have a date on the cover, this date is the date that the magazine is published, it can often be found next to the barcode or issue number. For my product i have placed it besides the issue number, this is in keeping with the generic conventions. 

Despite my magazine fitting in with many conventions, the product i have created also challenges them. One of the way that it does this is the setting i have opted to choose when photographing my models. Although a studio, i have chosen to use a black back drop and low level lighting. I found that this style worked best for the genre of the artists music and produced nicer quality images when put next to images where i’d experimented with using a white backdrop. Music magazines do use black backdrops however it is less conventional.