Draft Evaluation- Question 1.

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

My media product initially was an idea from a vintage magazine called Creem. From handing in my draft, I changed the entire look and style of my magazine to something to that of more Mojo, NME and simple covered magazines with indie genre. Through looking at these types of magazines I picked up several elements from them to expand on within my own magazine. Things such as headings, contents page layouts and general structures of the magazine.  

The font used on the front cover of my magazine I decided to keep simple and bold and I used Neau Thin from DaFont. From looking at other magazines for inspiration I noticed that some magazine titles were more noticed than others. As my cover is simplistic in itself, I wanted to make sure certain aspects of it were clearer to readers.  The fonts at the bottom of the page were used a little differently to add a little more excitement to the magazine. I didn’t want to crowd the cover but I also didn’t want it to be boring. To solve this situation I used a range of fonts to supplement for the loss of activity on the cover.

On the front page of my magazine I also used a barcode, with an issue number and a price for my magazine. I did this to make the front cover more realistic and follow exisiting conventions. I came to the price of my magazine by averaging prices of other existing magazines and ranging it around those to make it realistic and reasonable.  Although my cover is simple, it does hold relevant information on the front to explain and give hints to what is inside that particular issue.

When making my magazine, I challenged the conventions of Rule Of Thirds. Instead of the usual Rule of Thirds that is a vertical guideline of basic magazine layout, I did a more horizontal Rule of Thirds. Although my Masthead was still at the top of the page, I used a double person image, with their main focus in the middle of the page and then used my cover lines at the bottom of my page.

The image I used for the magazine was originally a picture of these same two people but they were back to back facing the opposite direction. I developed my magazine a little more and swapped this image as I thought it was a key aspect for such a simple magazine to have eye contact with the front cover model(s).  The image used on the final design of my front cover shows my models giving eye contact. For their modelling shoot, I decided I wanted my models to wear a particular set of clothes and have particular make up. I had inspiration from other magazines such as NME and Mojo.  I also looked at several other magazines similar to the genre of mine (Indie/Alternative) and took styles, positions and clothing etc. from those to inspire my magazine cover.

I think the fact I have used a simple background for my front cover shows even more simplicity as I have continued this background throughout the magazine. I have also continued with the colour scheme throughout the entire magazine to clearly show that each page is from the same magazine.

On my contents page I really wanted to make it look minimalist. I had a lot of inspiration from the magazine Mojo. The layout and colour layout of the contents page was made with Mojo in mind.  I used another image of the two models on the front, and used an even more simple approach with them. I also added another image of a different model for my contents page. From looking at other magazines I noticed there was more than one image or more than one model somewhere on the page.  With this in mind I used another model and linked them to the contents page and gave them an artist name to match. I added in a competition text, as I seen that this popped up often in other similar magazines.

My double page spread was one of my favourite pages to make during the process of my magazine creation. I used pull quotes within the page to make it look like a real magazine, as again pull quotes are popular with other magazines of a similar genre. I did an interview for my double page spread and used text and language similar to that of NME articles. Again I continued with the colour scheme throughout the double page spread to match the contents page and front cover.

From my draft, I used different layouts and fonts. I learnt these did not work with the idea of my magazine, so I developed the entire magazine to look completely different, more relevent and more suited to the style.