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

forms and conventions of real media products?

My front cover is conventional to many types of regional magazine as it's primary image is one of a structure or point of interest – in this case, Brixton Academy. However, many of the regional magazines which feature landscapes on the cover instead of people tend to not have the primary image connect with an article featured in the issue (note the Cotswold Life cover, which is simply pretty landscape photography) , whereas I chosemy venue photo because it fitted with my indie music theme and still celebrated London without breaking convention. It also challenges the convention set down that the more urban regional magazines should feature celebrities or people on the cover – Time Out, the current primary London regional magazine has a celebrity on the cover each issue, and I wanted to subvert that – to showcase London as a city and a place to be rather than just some famous people within it.

Our title and logo, iLondon, uses the convention that regional magazines' titles should contain the the name of the region they are representing, but with our own youthful spin on it, to draw in a younger crowd. The font choice for the title challenged both the strong serifed fonts of the countryside magazines and also the bubbly graphic design style of the more urban magazines, as our choice was of a more elegant style, reminiscent of cafes and boutique bakeries, and the Eye graphic we felt was quirky and simple. We hoped our younger audience would prefer this as it has no connections to other regional magazines, which they may consider boring

Our contents page is partially unconventional as its bottom left short columns aren’t very conventional for both regional magazines or in non-regional ones – contents pages are generally conceived to be single columns and the focus of the pages. Our contents page, however has a strong focus on the editors note and the images placed around it instead of the contents text. Our contact, legal, and app information on the bottom half are in fact conventional, however, as the contents page or the last page are traditional places to put the credits of the people who made the magazine.

This example from Q magazine (not regional, but still a useful example) shows how contents pages are normally laid out – at the left side, in a single column

My advert page is conventional for a regional magazine because it advertises services within the region. Graphically it’s quite similar to other guitar lesson adverts I had researched, with drawn guitars as the focal point, but it has more of a focus on the text and information than a lot of other magazine adverts. I broke that convention because I felt guitar lessons are too personal to advertise like clothes or furniture, and you need to know a lot of information about the lessons before committing to them. So the advert contains a fair amount of information on the lessons, where to obtain the lessons, or more information - which is also pretty conventional for an advert, regardless of whether it’s regional or not. My font choice is pretty unconventional too, having only the typewriter/rockschool font in a style that people associate with guitars and rock music.

Examples of other magazine guitar lesson adverts – they’ve got more rock-styled fonts and a larger focus on images of people playing guitars, but less information.

My advert page is relatively conventional – clear but formal fonts for the title and the actual body of text, several large photos to illustrate alongside, some supplementary information (in this case, it’s the album info in the top left) and with a white background and black text. The title of the article also ties into my colour scheme, which is conventional. The actual text of the interview follows interview conventions; having background info of the band and the location of the interview at the beginning of the article, stating the questions and the answers, thanking the interviewee at the end. The language used is friendly, like most interviews with non-celebrities or local people. The page number and magazine title at the bottom of the page and the section of the magazine the article fits into at the top of the page are both conventional too. Overall, my article page is the most conservative page of my magazine, sticking firmly to devices and conventions established in both regional magazines and otherwise.

Our magazine billboard is mildly unconventional. For one, there aren’t a lot of regional magazine billboards around, so there aren’t many conventions to follow specifically for regional magazines, but it follows a few rules set by more universal magazines regardless. It contains the logo/title of our magazine displayed prominently at the top, it contains a catchy slogan, our website, and images of the magazine on its various formats – ‘The Resident’ billboard poster shown illustrates that these are conventional to magazine billboard adverts.However, our central image is much different to most magazine adverts, because they either contain people or strong minimal graphic design and block colours (see the orange in the resident billboard, again, and the Time magazine’s black/white/red design) and ours features a lot of detail. This was because our brand wasn’t established yet and we couldn’t rely on our audience to associate our colour scheme with our magazine, so we had to provide more detail.However, like the Time magazine billboard, our fonts and colour schemes tie into the general design of our magazine and campaign, using the same fonts and the red banner and use of London landmarks.