Evaluation: Question 1

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

My media product imitates the conventions of the indie-rock music magazines by sticking to the general bold writing, the fun-loving artists (which I have imitated in my photographs), and the colour red which seemed to be a very popular colour used for this genre.
I have chosen the same distributor (Bauer media) as many other music magazines, including 'Q'.
I have designed my double page spread article to be a Q & A, which is typical of music magazines, and have kept one page for the picture and the other for mainly writing. However, I have challenged conventions here by keeping the picture running throughout both pages and using the picture as a background to my article which worked as this was snow so the black writing showed up well.
My contents page was heavily influenced by 'Q', using a red, white and black colour scheme and keeping the article titles to the left and the pictures to the right. However, I developed the style to suit my magazine by having a letter from the editor, a column on the right hand side containing a list of artists, and a much larger 'monthly' section.
I felt that by doing this I could entice a larger devoted following as having more monthly articles meant that there was more for people to enjoy, whether they were into festivals or competitions. Another way in which I developed my magazine away from conventions was by including a large amount of content on festivals rather than artists (although I still had plenty of those). This meant that my demographic was kept to my younger target audience as younger people tend to go to festivals.