The student created a music magazine that drew upon conventions of real magazines. The magazine used a three-color scheme of black, red, and white for the cover and contents page, and featured a large, bold masthead relating to the R&B/hip-hop genre. While most magazines include multiple pictures on contents pages, the student only included one main image to make it less cluttered, following conventions of R&B and hip-hop magazines specifically. For the double-page spread, the student again followed R&B/hip-hop magazine conventions by placing the main image on one page and the article on the other, rather than writing on both pages as typical magazines do.

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

2. My music magazine does use the forms and conventions of a
real media product in many ways from the front cover to the
actual content I used. The colour scheme I chose to go with
only had three colours which consisted of black, red and
white. I chose this because I realised from my research of a
range of magazines that they only used three main colours in
their colour scheme. For my front cover I chose I white
backdrop so my model can stand out more and be the main
focus of the front cover. My model wore colours which
matched my colour scheme of black, red and white.

3. Another way I followed the common magazine conventions
was by having my masthead at the top of the page. My
masthead was also big, bold and stood out very well on my
front cover. Furthermore my masthead relates to my genre of
RnB/Hiphop because of the type of font I used. I am aware
also from my case study that the masthead usually acts as a
logo so the audience can immediately recognize which type of
magazine it is and genre too. Therefore, I made sure my
masthead was short and snappy.

4. One way I challenged the forms and conventions of a real media product
was to only include only one main picture in my contents page. I have
done this on purpose because during my research of looking at other
magazines some typical magazines had a number of pictures on their
contents page, which I did not really like as I find it cluttered. Having
more than one picture on the contents page is a form and convention of a
typical magazine. The magazines which I found to have only one main
picture in their contents were the RnB and HipHop magazines. As I my
magazine was also an RnB and HipHop magazine I wanted to follow their
forms and conventions but not that of a conventional magazine. I found
my contents page was really easy to read as all of my features were down
one side of the page with my model on the other side of the page. The
font I used was a bold font so it was easy to see and read. I had three
subheadings which were a bit bigger than the rest of the writing which
were features, regulars and news. I saw this type of contents on a
conventional magazine contents page which I chose to follow. The colour
scheme of the contents page was the same as both the front cover and
double page spread.

5. For my double page spread I didn’t follow the forms and
conventions of a typical magazine as I followed the forms and
conventions of an RnB and HipHop magazine. Once again I chose
to follow an Rnb and HipHop magazine because it was the same
genre as my magazine. My double page spread consisted of a
main image of my model on one page and on the other page my
article. I saw this kind of layout on a number of RnB and HipHop;
it wasn’t the same as a normal magazine as they would have
written content on both of the double pages. My written content
included me asking questions to the artist and she would reply
back. My questions were written in bold writing so they stood out
so the audience can differentiate between the interviewer and
artist. The colour scheme remained the same as it matched the
whole of the magazine.