Evaluation 1

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

While researching magazines, I realized that they all had a "template", conventions of magazines. Such as Masthead, Dateline, Main image, Main cover line and barcode. These are the main ones that appear in every magazines. Other conventions are the selling line, cover lines, model credit and the left third. I went to research further on more "artistic magazines" since indie music was a part of my magazine. In those magazines such as Indie, AnOther, Inventory went for a more simple yet powerful approach. Meaning, their main image was usually in the middle, not leaving a left third. This was to create focus and tension between the buyer and the magazine. They had less, or no cover lines at all to emphasize on the detail of the design on the magazine and their content. Since I was doing an indie-acoustic magazine, I researched acoustic magazine and indie magazine. I realized that both magazines had different target groups. The layout for acoustic's magazine was the more contemporary kind like cosmopolitan, however, indie's magazine was more "artistic". I had to find a way to combine both to suit my target group. Since it was an indie- acoustic magazine, I would say the percentage of my target group for indie to the percentage for just acoustic would be 60% to 40%. Hence, I decided to make my magazine simple but yet informative in a way that does not include cover lines. The cover photos of most "artistic" magazines are usually crazy, wild and colorful. So I decided to tone down on my image but have that eye contact with the viewers- potential buyers. I used the forms and conventions of real magazines such as a masthead and selling lines.   I developed by instead of having the cover lines; I put the model credit, cost, barcode and issue number in the third left. I challenged forms and conventions of media products by having a neon border on my magazine and having my main cover line like that of a text book. 

Moving on to content pages, the forms and conventions are usually: heading contents, name or brand, usually a white background, features organized into a column, one large image or a few more, page numbers, issue number and date and no more than 3/4 colors. I did all these forms and conventions, but just developed and challenged these conventions using layout and typography. Usually, real magazine content pages are only one page, instead I made it a double spread. I put in more amount of pictures than the normal conventions. However, it still looks simple and little due to the layout. Since there is only 3/4 colors on the content page, I edited all my images in the same color scheme or made it black and white.  

For my double spreads, the forms and conventions are usually a title, a sub title and editor/ photographer credit and photos. I followed all these but did it in a slightly different way. My magazine is more simple, yet eye catching. My target group has quite a wide age range gap. So i had to make the photographs seem as important as the text. My layout of text was very "box" like. My main inspiration was shapes. Quotes and headings were in a typical way of most magazines that was just written in a line. Some of my text was placed diagonally, like a triangle and even in a circle. To ensure that my text was readable, I printed out my double spreads to let people read them. True enough, it was. Some of my images filled up 3/4 of a page. This was how I challenged and developed from the forms and conventions of real media products- magazines.