Evaluation question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge

forms and conventions of real media products?

The titleO the title of my magazine follows the conventions of the real

media product kerrang! Magazine, as you can see both fonts are bold and in capitals. I used a font called Truskey from www.dafont.com as I wanted to take it one step further than kerrang! And have all of the holes in the lettering covered and more erosion going through the text. Both titles have connotations of music as Kerrang! Is an onomatopoeic sound that an electric guitar would make which identifies the product as being associated with rock music, similarly I chose to call my magazine amplified which has connotations of loud music as you use an amplifier to amplify the music you are playing and rock concerts famously have lots of large ones on the stage. I further edited the title in Photoshop to give it a reddish tinge as I found that a lot of rock magazines used the colour red, I did not want my whole title to be red so using the tint airbrushing tool I gave it a slight red tint.

People in the magazineO The models I used for magazine also follow conventions of my chosen

genre magazine. Their appearance is typical for the rock genre of checked shirts; band t-shirts, dark colours, jeans, military boots with dark hair and piercings. My cover model Aaron, has similar to style to that of Enter Shikari and 30 seconds to mars, who are regular cover artists for Kerrang, Rock sound and NME, he had a unique and interesting look which looked great in the images I had taken with the contrast turned up really high. My second model Becca, is an actual singer who sings acoustic songs but wears a lot of dark clothing who I thought is similar to the lead singer of lacuna coil, but she also challenges the conventions as there is not many female artists who feature in rock magazines but I thought that I should use a female model as well so that the magazine is not gender biased. Lastly my photos of local bands fit the conventions as they were all rock bands similar to the likes of Arctic Monkeys and You Me At Six.

TextO I placed colours boxes behind some

of the text so that it was easier to read, and so that it stood out, I got this idea from this issue of NME where the majority of the text is in small black boxes.

Contents PageO I think the montage of photos is quite

conventional for a magazine along with the page numbers on the photo, I arranged my features into 5 sections that after researching I thought a music magazine would have, I named the fourth one backstage pass as it has further connotations of music, and entices the reader into the articles as it sounds more interesting than behind the scenes. I also put some information about the free cd that my magazine comes with in a box at the bottom as I found most magazines who gave away freebies did not give that much information about them and quite often just had a small box in the contents. In addition to this to carry on the rock look I added distressed and eroded graphics and text to fill the white spaces and make the page more appealing.

Double Page SpreadO I think my double page spread is quite conventional as it

has a colour scheme of red and black which is commonly seen in rock genre magazines, I but the text in black boxes which had ink and paint splats around to symbolise the rebellion and rough look the audience identify with. I also added the ‘amplified playlist’ box which I hadn’t seen in magazines but found the quite often had small boxes of information and I thought the reader would probably be interested in the artists music choices so I added this.