Evaluation part 1

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

My front cover
My front cover is heavily based on a Q front cover that I looked at in my research; I did this because Q uses very simple design format’s that still look very effective. The main image on my front cover is a close-up of a girl in heavy eye makeup holding onto drum sticks, I edited the photograph’s to make it more music genre specific. The background of the photograph is plain so that the attention is focused on the main image, not the background. The artist is called ‘Suze’ and her name is in large ‘Poplar Std’ font in white, with a black shadow. This is typical of music magazine front cover’s.
The name of the magazine is in different font to the rest of the magazine cover, this is because I wanted it to be noticeable and recognisable. I chose to have a black bar down the left hand side of the main image with smaller pictures of other artist’s, this was to show the main genre of music of the magazine and what other features were inside. This is similar to an NME magazine cover.

The contents page
The language I used on the contents page was more informal than the front page. I did this because the audience I was targeting prefers a ‘chattier’ form of language. The main photograph I used was in keeping with other contents pages that I did my research on. Instead of being set in front of a black background the photograph has an intended ‘real place’ background. The colouring on the contents page only uses about 4 colours, this was to make it more obvious that it was an ‘M!’ magazine because of the colour scheme.

The double page spread
The photograph used on the double page spread is practically the same as the front cover, this is because I wanted this to be one of the main attractions of the magazine and it made sense for them to correlate. Many of the double pages in my research break the boundary between photograph and text and have the titles over lapping the image, so this is what I did. Again I kept with the colours of the magazine.