Evaluation - Question 1 General Conventions

In what ways does your music magazine use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real music magazines?

Throughout our magazine, we have taken into consideration the conventions used in official music magazines today. We have taken inspiration from other music magazines and assessed what makes a magazine attract the specific audience.
Our front cover was created to be eye-catching and stylish as this was an important part of our genre and audience. Style is a very bit part of the indie rock genre, which was shown through out readership profile and previous mood boards. When first starting out with front cover, I decided to try out the house style of red, blues and black colours. However after widening our understanding of other magazine conventions we developed our photo shoots and house style.  We looked at a music/style magazine called INDIE and really liked the style and image used on the front cover. We took inspiration from those conventions and applied to our magazine. The chosen image for our front cover was a single shot of one of the chosen models; we liked this, as it was stylish and artistic. After that we applied this photo to choose an appropriate house style and colour scheme. We used blue, white and black when applying text to our front cover. For the coverlines we used Indie Summer for the typography, this became a font we used throughout our magazine and became a theme.
For the masthead we looked at the conventions of the music magazine NME, this is another music magazine, which we took inspiration from. We really liked the bold and bright masthead they used, which we then applied this to our magazine by creating our own masthead/logo. We used Arial Black as our font and created a bold masthead, when creating out front cover we took into consideration the colours of the photo and applied to the colour of the masthead. For the front cover, we used blue; black and white for the house style, the masthead ‘I.N’ was blue with black behind to give it a shadow. Overall this works well for our front cover as it eye-catching and colorful, it also fits the conventions of other music magazine like NME.  When creating a composition for the front cover we chose to arrange the coverlines around the main image of the model. This created a balance on the page having coverlines of either side of the model as well as keeping the masthead the main focal point of the page as well as the main image.  We engaged with the audience by adding inclusive coverlines, which draws in the readers. For example we encouraged the readers to ‘keep up with the latest charts and trends’. This gives the audience a sense of solidarity and inclusivity meaning more readers will want to engage with the magazine.

For our contents page we were inspired by conventions displayed in magazines such as Q, which is another music magazine. We liked how page was set out and we decided to create a good

composition for our magazine. We decided to apply the colour scheme of our photo shoot, which was red, blue, white and black, to the house style of the page. This created a balanced composition and the colours of the page complimented the images from the photo shoot. We diverted away from the colour scheme of the front cover, which is generally challenging the conventions of many music magazines as many magazines create a set house style throughout.  However I think this works well for our magazine as it shows we are covering a range of styles and colour schemes, this also helps us to appeal to a wider audience as we can cover a wider range of preferred styles. The typography used for our title for this page we used to show our professionalism and create a sophisticated contents page.  We decided to differentiate the INDIE NOW from the CONTENTS as this

created a more stylish and individual font by making the INDIE NOW the red colour we used throughout the contents page.  This theme was carried on throughout the page, we applied this colour the bold and highlighted words within the text as well as the page references. This follows the conventions of most magazines as the page references are usually highlighted as well as important words. Our general layout fits the contemporary conventions of majority of magazines. We chose to use a few images distributed around the page including images from our main article about our band and other artists
highlighted on our contents page. By using other artists this creates a good range and shows a variety of people/models used in our magazine rather than just one artist. This would fit the general conventions in most
magazines. To improve the contents page I would think about using another image for the main image.

For our double page spread we followed the general conventions of music magazines when regarding the layout and composition of our double-page spread. We adjusted out image to cover the two pages, as we wanted to create an interesting and fun article. The band we created for our main article we decided to aim at the younger section of our audience, therefore we wanted to make our article trendy and colourful. This might challenge the conventions of many music magazines as many of the articles shown are sophisticated. However the house style we chose for our double-page spread fit the genre and style of our music magazine more as it would appeal to our music magazine more. When writing our article we came across the issue of having the text stand out above the main image, we decided to improve it by added a purple tinted text box around the article. I think this created a nice house style and complimented the colours of the main image. When arranging the page, we chose to put the article of the right side of the second page; we avoided the text covering the models faces in the image. This follows conventions of many magazines, as the main image is usually the focal point of the page.  To then balance out the page we added Polaroid’s of other images from our photo shoot, this complimented the style and genre of our magazine. The Polaroid’s were placed on the left of the first page and this balanced out the composition.  To also compliment the house style, we again used the font Indie Summer for our main title of the page. This creates a flow through the magazine as well as using Arial which was a popular font shown in our survey results. By using this font for our main article is a simple and easy to read which benefits the reader, this would fit the conventions of other music magazines.  However we could have challenged the conventions of other magazines as we again have used a different colour scheme from our front cover and contents page.  However I think this works well for our magazine as we are showcasing different styles throughout our magazine, but by using the Indie Summer font we are still creating a fluent house style.

Overall I think the final products we have created work well for our genre and fit the image of our audience. Our front cover is stylish and eye-catching, our contents has a sophisticated and professional element to it, and finally out contents page has a trendy and fun feel to it which all appeals to our audience.