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

Conventions are things that are regarded as the normative example - a basic structure if you like. They often help with defining what something is. For example, cars have 4 wheels - 4 wheels is the convention, once you have you convention you can start doing your own thing. You may then decide to make a luxury car, and a typical convention here would be that luxury cars have leather seats - but you may go on to design the seats in your own way.

Essentially, a convention in the norm, the standard, the skeleton structure. When creating anything from a car to a magazine, you will usually follow some sort of convention before you venture out and turn your item into your item.

Depending on the target audience, some magazines may follow conventions more than others. Am magazine which targets a very specific sub culture may not follow conventions as much as a magazine which is very mainstream.

This front cover of Vibe which influenced my magazine does follow a few conventions. The masthead follows conventions in 2 ways - It's at the top of the page, and the cover subject (Usher) overlays it. The other conventions this magazine follows is having one main cover picture, as oppose to several pictures, and of course, cover titles around the picture. It also has a main cover line (One that stands out more than the others)Usher "There is no competition)) which includes a quote - another convention that a lot of magazines follow.

Above the masthead, you can also see names of other stars who are featured in the magazine at some point - another convention that particularly music magazines do seem to follow.

The front cover of my magazines follows a lot of conventions - but breaks some others. The front cover of my magazine features a masthead at the top, with featured artists above the masthead. It follows the "One main image" convention, but changed it slightly, since the photo is a close up, and it goes behind the masthead as oppose to over the top of it. Like most magazines, it features many cover lines, and one of them is a quote, however, it does not have a "Main" cover titles which particularly stands out from the rest - although one of the titles is related the the main picture. One thing I included which most music magazines do not is a sort of bar at the bottom, which includes more featured articles, and arrows which appear to "point" to the next page. I included this because I saw a similar "bar" on a gaming magazine which had a similar style to my magazine, and is also aimed at a similar age group.

Contents pages tend not to have such set conventions like Front covers do. For the background picture in my contents page I chose a very urban photo, with a sense of mystery about it. I feel that my audience will be intrigued by the photo, since it suggests a very solo approach from the artist. I also chose a more light hearted image to go in the middle of the page. This very much breaks the conventions of magazines like mine, but I think having an image like this makes my magazine different, and makes it stand out from competitors. It still has all the normal, 'serious' stuff, but with a funny image and article to go with it, it breaks conventions and stands out from the rest.

I very much stuck with the colour scheme from my front cover, and carried it over in to my contents page and double page spread. I feel that something like this is to big of a convention to break, as it can alienate the audience, and feel like a different magazine if you change the colour scheme to drastically. For this reason, I stuck to my main colours of Red,Black,Grey and white throughout each piece of my magazine.

In my Feature article, one of the conventions I stuck to was pulling a quote from the text, and putting it elsewhere on the page in order for it to stand out. I done this 3 times : In the bottom right corner, and near the middle, where I pulled 2 quotes which relate to each other. Having quotes like this somewhat breaks the usual convention, but I felt it was suited to the style of the Interview. As I have mentioned, I tried to keep for the same kind of style and colour scheme from the rest of the magazine. I also chose to have 2 photos, whereas most magazines tend to have 1 main picture. Since this is a double page spread, I wanted to have a picture for each page, with neither words of pictures crossing over the page - this keeps the pages separate from each other, so that the 2 images don't look to "over-powering."