FOLLOWING AND CHALLENGING CONVENTIONS: INSPIRATION FROM EXISTING PRODUCTSFront covers

MASTHEADSWhen creating my masthead I took inspiration from several different other magazines, however my main inspiration would have to be ‘Q’ magazine.

• I chose to use one letter for my Masthead “R” which stands for “Rock”

• I used two colours White & Red because most existing mastheads only use a maximum of three colours and I thought that two would make it look both simplistic and professional and also it will make a contrast between the two colours to make it stand out a lot more so my audience would know what it is.

• I placed the masthead in the top left hand side of my music magazine as conventionally this is usually where the masthead is placed so it’s easy to see.

FEATURE STORIES• Whilst making my product I also took into consideration feature stories and where I was going to place them within my product. I followed conventions by placing these feature stories on either the left of right hand side of my magazine either side of my main image. The magazine uses certain font’s and colours to highlight certain parts of the feature so I used this convention within my music magazine as you can see with the artists names I chose to put the first part of the name in white text and the second in red, this was to make them stand out more.

FOOTERS• Although not every magazine includes a footer on the front cover of their

magazines, I thought that I would include this convention in my product. Here are some examples below of footers used in real music magazines. As you can see from the examples below footers are usually used to advertise more feature stories and artists inside the magazine. I used mine to feature more artists that I couldn’t fit on the front cover to try and attract more people to read my music magazine. Once again I used the colours white and red to follow my colour scheme of red, white and black so that my overall product looks more professional and so that I follow conventions.

BARCODES• Barcodes are a necessary convention to include in a magazine however

they are not a selling factor of the magazine. They are usually placed at the bottom of the magazine so that they are out of the way and don’t take up much space and also not that noticeable as their only purpose is when scanned through in a shop. I followed the normal convention of barcodes when creating the front cover to my magazine as I placed my barcode in the bottom right hand side of my magazine. As you can see from these other examples they also include the date and issue number of the magazine so I also chose to include these conventions next to my barcode too.

PLUGS

• Plugs are a convention of magazines but don’t really apply much to music magazines. They usually advertise an exclusive story or section within the magazine. They are used to attract readers to read your magazine by also advertising competitions within the magazine. These are some examples of plugs that I found from already existing music magazines and also my plug. For my plug I chose to make it red white and black to follow my colour scheme and also placed it to the top right of my magazine so that it was still visible but also out of the way.

MAIN STORIES

• Conventionally main stories on the front cover of a magazine are usually in larger text then all the other stories and also usually in a different font. This is so that they stand out from the rest of the stories as this is one of the main features of this magazines issue. Furthermore conventionally they usually have a pull down quote taken from the main article to give the reader a look into what’s in the article so I included this into my front cover too. I also included the artist name within my feature story as this is the main selling point of my product

MAIN IMAGES

• Main images are conventionally framed as midshots/ from the waste upwards and usually depict one artist/ band as shown in these front covers. When taking the picture for my front cover I followed conventions by framing my main image in a midshot and used a range of clothes and props to target my specific target audience so that it would stand out to my audience more and follow the conventions of the genre of music magazine that I created.