This document summarizes how the student's media product challenges conventions of real music magazines. It uses a colorful neon font and four colors throughout the magazine as its brand identity, rather than the typical single color. It also incorporates those colors into the masthead, double page spreads, and contents page in colorful lines. Feedback was positive on the uniqueness of this approach compared to magazines like Vibe and NME that use only a couple colors. The student aimed to make the magazine stand out from typical magazines like Q that only use a few colors on the front page with more text than photos.

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

2. Conventions of a music magazineMast Head on top of pageFront Page Photo of bandIssue NumberBarcodePriceOther information in the magazine

3. Our Funk music magazine follows the normal conventions of music magazines, such as the mast head at the top, Main front page photo, Barcode, price and issue number, and other small photos which give more information to the reader.

4. We decided to do a Funk music magazine, as there wasn’t one that existed in the market. When I thought of a Funk magazine, I thought of a very colourful, house style as people who listen to funk music usually go out clubbing or to parties as it is a very upbeat genre of music. This gave us the idea to develop the convention of using just a couple of colours in our house style as most magazines do, and use a lot of colours so that we get our target audience’s attention.Vibe uses blue and yellowNME uses red and white

5. Another convention of a music magazine is to have a simple brand identity with one colour. We also developed this convention to fit our music genre and house style. We decided to use a neon font as we wanted it to look like a neon sign you usually see in the city at night. Then we made it colourful and added four colours which would be carried out through all of the magazine and be an important part of the house style. I also added some colourful lines which were created by light drawing and then changed using the hue tool in Photoshop to the four colours in the brand identity. I carried this out throughout the magazine and made it an important part of the house style. I used it on the contents page as well as in the middle of the double page spread.Colourful lines in mast head, double page spread and contents pageColours used in double page spread

6. We got a lot of feedback for our magazine house style as we wanted to test it out because it didn’t follow the conventions of a normal music magazine. We used focus groups and also posted our magazines on Facebook as we have a lot of people aged 16-25 on there, which is our target audience. We got some positive feedback about the uniqueness of our magazine which showed us that our magazine would stand out in the market and people would buy it.

7. Comparison to an existing magazineWe wanted to mainly challenge the conventions of music magazines as our genre is quite new and there isn’t a magazine dedicated to it in the market, so we thought we could make it stand out from the rest of the magazines. As you can see, Q magazine only uses the colours red, white, black and green (for the band green day) on their front page, whereas in our magazine, we have used a range of colours for the background of the photo as well as the master head and fonts. The first thing that you can see on our magazine is the brand identity, which will ensure that the viewers would remember our magazine.We have also used three photo other photos on the front page other than the main one so that viewers can see them and want to open the magazine and read about them. There is more writing on Q magazine as their audience might read it, on the other hand, our audience would be interested by the photos as they wont have time to read the text. Our questionnaire (Q9) shows that we would have to make the cover attractive so convince the audience to buy it, we wanted more photos on it.