Question 1; In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products ?

When making my music magazine I didn’t really look into challenging the original music magazine conventions in order to gain a bigger audience and for the magazine to be unique, because the information I gained from my research was that magazine consumers were more interested in seeing the normal magazine conventions and features and therefore would not really be attracted to a music magazine with completely different style and structure to it. Looking at other magazines such as Vibe, NME and Kerrang for guidance on the normal conventions I learnt that these magazines include and always have a masthead which is the logo for the magazine normally displayed at the top of the front cover and usually on the contents page as well Which is there for the branding of the magazine.

Another convention I came across that was on these magazine was the month and year that it was published and a price that it is being sold which is normally found around the barcode used for retailers distributing purpose’s. Also on the front cover of these magazine are a number of cover line’s placed around the main image but not that it takes away the main focus of the main image which always occurred to be a medium close up.

When I took a look at conventions of a contents page I found the colour schemes and fonts was usually produced from the colour schemes used in the front cover and page organisation was all based on what the front page had. However unlike the front page whereby just one photograph is used contents pages tend to have more than one of these smaller images placed around the page with their page numbers.

As for double page spread conventions that the main image is normally spread across the whole double page or a main image on one a4 side of the page and is normally a mode of address image and then writing on the other side and is written in columns 3 or 4 of them consuming space on the double page.

In the three magazines I looked at they all had a strap line before starting the article or the interview or whatever the double page is based on explaining what the subject of the page is along with a by-line normally placed and the bottom left corner of the page. 

I did not really challenge the norm music magazine conventions when creating my front cover ,double page spread and contents page because of what i had observed from professional companies products also because its what my target audience were looking to see in a music magazine. like other magazine i used sans serif for my writing because its modern whereas serif will make the magazine look old fashioned and that would not appeal to my Grimey underground audience because its urban and very up to date with society.