Conventions & House Style

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

• For my final page designs I took a lot of inspiration from magazines such as Kerrang! and Rock Sound.

• I decided to pick these magazines to look into and study the layout of because of the relevance in genre. Another reason I thought these magazines would be appropriate to use as a guideline is because of the images and text. In my planning I decided on what I was aiming for text and photo wise, I thought it would be suitable to look at particular magazines such as Kerrang! to make my magazine look as professional as I could possibly make it.

• Due to using key magazine conventions from other magazines, I believe my final product looks very traditional in sense of fitting into a rock genre music magazine.

• For example: I used dark colours, bold fonts and made the text informal.

From my labelled front cover you can see I have included many key magazine conventions, however I have also left some out. For example: Puffs and a magazine Slogan. This is because I thought the front cover worked without it, and it already has enough going on and I think it would look too busy and cramped if I added any more text/images etc. 

• For my contents page and feature article page I thought it was important to include as many key conventions as possible. This is to keep the pages looking traditional yet professional. I am happy with the outcome of my pages in this way.

• For my feature article I made sure I used the conventions you find in a lot of magazines for this page. For example: a drop cap, text grabs and a main dominant image of the article is referring to.

• I originally had my image for my feature article on the other side, because the right side of the page and the facing page for the reader. However I decided to switch my image to the left page because overall the layout and presentation looked better.

• My house style is also very prominent in both my contents page and feature article. In particular the colours red, black and white. I didn’t use a fluent font throughout my magazine though because I had issues with editing the background to make it match and fit with different colours. Next time, I believe I would look harder to find a more suitable font that I could use throughout to make my house style stronger and more fluent.

• I took a lot of inspiration from Kerrang! Magazine for my contents page, in particular the main image at the top. I thought it looked appropriate and suited the magazine, and therefore wanted to incorporate something similar in my design/layout.