Evaluation Question 1

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

When creating my magazine, I made sure to make it look professional, it was important to base my work around real products from real media conventions. To be able to do this, I carried out different types of research including general, specific and detailed. This enabled me to analyse aspects of front covers, contents pages and double page spreads to get an idea of popular layouts and appropriate fonts and ideas for colour schemes. Using real products from real media conventions as guidelines enabled me to adapt my work to make it look as professional as it could be. The main magazines I focused on when making my product were Q, BILLBOARD and Blender.

FRONT COVER:  The main media convention that I gained most of my ideas from was Q magazine. These ideas include the pose of the model and the colour scheme. I began with the pose of the model and realised that most of the models on Q magazine give a sexy, mysterious look which is what I wanted my model to give. I then looked at the colour scheme and decided to use RED, WHITE and BLACK which seems to be the most appropriate. However, I used the magazine BILLBOARD as the media convention to base my layout on. I did this by having Lily LOVE written over the model and then the writing over the empty space without having it written over the model.

CONTENTS PAGE:  I gained many ideas for my contents page from Q magazine as this was the most similar type of magazine to mine. I made my contents page layout similar to Q by the use of the large red banner and the name of the magazine next to it as used on the contents page featuring Cheryl Cole. The way I put together the page numbers and the information is similar to the layout of Q magazine to give it a professional look as shown on the contents page with The Courteeners and Adele. Also, the pictures I used were similar to the contents page with The Courteeners and I added a review at the bottom of the page to make it look professional.

DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD:  Similar to my contents page and front cover, I used Q magazine mostly as a guideline when creating the double page spread. I read through articles in Q magazine and wanted to do something similar. Also I made the layout of my double page spread similar to the one in Q by using the large L behind the article. Also for the pose of the model I took inspiration from Q magazine to give the sexy, mysterious look intended. Lastly, from the Q double page spreads, I was able to pick out the title of the page which only uses the name of the model so the reader has to read on to find out what happened. I did all of this to produce a professional looking double page spread and so it looks like a real product from real media conventions.