In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The main conventions of music magazine are the masthead and the front cover of course; also the contents of it must satisfy the readers. The design is also very important because it can either attract the audience or push them away. The front cover has to include a masthead; it must be attention grabbing so people will notice it in the shops. It also must have really good, well-structured cover lines, which will tell the readers what this particular issue contains, however it shouldn’t give away all the information, otherwise it wouldn’t arouse readers’ curiosity and they wouldn’t buy it to read. The picture on the front cover is crucially important too, it could be the photograph of the band/singer about whom the main article is written about, it could be a creative collage of different album covers, etc. The image should have a good quality and be bright to attract attention; also the front cover picture is the part of the design of the whole magazine. Personally I believe that cover lines shouldn’t cover the actual image of the background, otherwise the front cover looks messy and may distract the reader.
A typical contents page is a page with several (usually three) columns of cover lines with page numbers next to them. It also may contain some images associated with the articles from the magazine to intrigue the reader. The font is usually not very big, however must by stylish and fit in the design of the magazine. Some magazines like Mixmag may have two contents pages, because there are too many articles and sections in the magazine, therefore each of them need a cover line and a page number to guide the reader.
DPS is usually divided into six columns, however different magazines prefer different layouts. Sometimes photographs of the people the article is about are used as a background, therefore the text is laid on top of the picture. I think its very interesting and stylish, however it may be hard to read the text because of the range of colours. Both the contents and DPS have page number and the top or the bottom corners of the page and sometimes the website of the magazine is posted next to it. The section of the magazine could also be mentioned at the top or the bottom of the page, I think it is very useful as it helps readers to acknowledge what part of the magazine they are reading.
My contents page included images from the two main articles and three columns were created for the cover lines. However I worked on the design of the contents page a lot to attract readers’ attention as soon as they open my magazine. I made the text stand out by putting text boxes behind each line, coloured in black and the page numbers had a white background, I believe this contrast worked really well. The whole contents page is done in black and white, however the rest of the magazine contains colour. It could be a risky decision to make a whole contents page monochromatic, however I presume it worked well with the layout and the design I chose.
My DPS contains an article about German Lavrovksy who is presented on the front cover. I used one of his photographs which were taken specially for this issue as the background for the whole DPS. However only the left page contains text and the heading, the second one is left empty so people can see the part of the photograph (German’s face). Three columns were used with the font size 10, but the whole interview didn’t fit it in one page so I decided to create another one to post the end of the interview. I then used another photograph of German as a background and only two columns were filled with the text. I had a problem with this DPS because the pictures used for the background is too bright therefore it was hard to read the article. I then decided to be creative and to put translucent text boxes behind the columns of text so the letters would stand out. I hope that didn’t damage the design and the atmosphere of the magazine. The 1st DPS has text in black colour and the second one in white because I wanted to link my DPS with the contents page.
Overall, I feel that although I studied the magazine conventions very carefully, I decided to add some new ideas to my design, so that I could create something more eye catching and original than the music magazines currently on the market. Most of the contents pages of different magazines are very bright and colourful and contain a lot of images. But I decided to perform my contents page in black and white and as you can see there are only two images, two photographs from the articles. However I added some graphics design by using photoshop and publisher. I was afraid that my contents page would not look real, however as it turned out, the black and white effect worked really well with the design. DPS, I believe, is quite typical, however not many music magazines use a photograph as a background. The front cover followed the conventions I am afraid, but I am very pleased with it.
