Final evaluation activity 1

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

During the research stage of the product, we had to develop our ideas from looking at existing magazines and past students magazines which they had created. The most successful or well graded magazines were the ones with the conventions that I followed to create my magazine, the succesful magazines are a good example to follow because they are created by professional magazine editors who know exactly what their target audience looks for in a magazine. The golden spiral concept suggests that magazines are created to draw your eyes to the most aesthetically pleasing part of the page. Some magazines will challenge these conventions, but only if they know it will appeal to their target audience and still be successful. Other conventions rely on the rule of three: The way the page is divided portrait and landscape, the colour scheme, and the different fonts used. The masthead will always go across the top of the page, starting from either the center or the left side of the page.
The size of the magazine depends on whether it is a monthly or a weekly magazine, most monthly magazines have an average of 70-100 pages whereas a weekly magazine would have a much smaller number of around 30-40 pages. Other conventions such as colour relies on factors such as the genre of the magazine and the target audience, male or female etc.

When it came to designing the magazine, I made sure I took these conventions into account because they have proved to make the magazines pleasing to their target audience. I took a lot of interest from Q magazine because it was the magazine which stood out most to me and interested me most. This is because I would be included in their target audience range, of which I had a similar target audience for my magazine. My masthead is conventional to other magazines as it is the largest text on the page, it is also conventional to Q magazine as it follows the large white text on a red background, I followed Q magazines idea for the masthead because the contrast of colours and large text makes it stand out and it's eyecatching. It is placed along the whole of the top of the magazine, which again follows the convention. My choice of title reflects the magazine, which is a convention used by NME, which is an abreviation for a longer topic reflected title.

The graphology of the pages is something I strongly took inspiration for from successful magazines such as Q magazine. This is because these magazines have been edited and tested to find the most appealing layout to the reader which will be pleasing to look at and easy to read. So following the layout of a successful magazine will ensure that the layout of my magazine will work successfully. I think the layout is particularly effective on the front cover, I mainly took inspiration from Q magazine which tended to have not too much information on the cover, but enough to make people intrigued about the magazine and I put similar phrases/text ideas on my cover to Q magazine. The layout consisted of a large masthead, following the white text on a red background idea from Q magazine, a large close up shot, with text going across the person with enough text to get people interested. I then had cover lines at the edge of the page on each side which is another thing Q magazine has on their front cover, I chose the text for these to relate to articles that readers would be interested in because they follow the current gossip.

Photographs are another key part of the magazine, although it is difficult to match the standard of photographs on successful magazines because they have been taken by a professional photographer and the model of the image has also been styled in a certain way by professional stylists. When I chose my model I already had some criteria I had previously decided, for example I wanted a blonde girl who was naturally pretty so not much makeup was needed to make the red lipstick stand out the most. I wanted the hair to be medium to long lengthed hair so that there would be some natural flow in her hair if I decided at any time to do a photo representing movement of some sort. The clothing and styling of the model was a key part, the clothes had to match the colour scheme of the magazine, for this reason I chose a black and white polka dot dress, as black was a main part of my colour scheme and all my backgrounds were to be white. I wanted darker clothing to make the hair and face stand out the most. I kept the makeup fairly simple, although I wanted the eyes quite dark and the lips really red, this was to match the colour scheme of black and red. I found that most magazines don't include any instruments in their photo shoot, so for this reason in my photo shoot I purely used my model on her own. I tried to adeer to the code of the golden spiral because that's the most prominant place that someone would look at when looking at the magazine.

I took over 100 photos and narrowed them down to the photos which the model looked to be most comfortable, as I thought it an important convention that the model should look comfortable in their poses. I then chose from the images which matched my style of magazine best and chose from different angles and different lenghts of shots.