question 1-evaluation

Dougie Magraw 

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

With my product of GMF magazine, I was looking to create a contemporary magazine, with regards to the genre, which would obviously develop and challenge mainstream forms and conventions. However, I still wanted to keep certain mainstream conventions as I felt they were a good selling point for the magazine. 

In comparison to other colour schemes that are commonly used in media products I’d say that ‘GMF magazine’ conforms to these. As you can see here for my photo shoot I chose a light grey background to ensure that the red guitar and red font stand out as they are the selling points, especially the red font. In the issue of ‘NME’ magazine (right) they have also used this method as it makes the words ‘Kasabian’ and ‘Insane’ stand out from the rest of the cover. Another way in which I have conformed to usual forms and conventions used in music magazines is with my layout of the front cover of ‘GMF magazine’; my cover lines have been placed on the left hand side of the cover resulting in the consumer noticing them in a magazine rack in order to gain their attention for the magazine. I have also had the cover story as the most noticeable text on the page, also on the left hand side. The convention of using numbers and shapes within a cover page is also apparent with my magazine. I chose these particular conventions because, personally, I felt that they were vital to entice people into buying the magazine.

On the other hand, with my contents page I chose to not conform to typical forms and conventions of a music magazine. The majority of music magazines choose to have separated images of the artists that are in the issue of the magazine (right) to signify where to find these stories. I chose not to do this (left) as I wanted to keep the emphasis on the cover story, also because of my lack of resources in regards to real images I had taken of particular artists. As GMF magazine is split into three sections; gigs, music and festivals. My intentions were to allow the reader easy access to the particular section of the magazine they prefer, I did this by having three sections of the contents; the ‘G’, the ‘M’ and the ‘F’.