Evaluation Question 1 (Draft) - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Before starting the creation of my magazine, I had to research into the existing formats of magazine designs to take away some ideas and concepts to create my own idea. The Genre that I decided I wanted to follow was Rock/ Pop Punk, so my main focus revolved around Mojo and Kerrang, with a rather cluttered style to represent the style of music present.

The style that is exceptionally popular when it comes to this genre, more so in Kerrang is to have a rather large logo at the top, with a rendered image of a music artist that is made to cover some, and sometimes all, of the magazine name. It is very common for the layers to overlap, with other layers being on top of the magazine title other than the rendered image, to give a sense of depth. There is often a headline, which more often than not is the name of the artist, with a subtitle following afterwards that usually related to the story in which the artist is in.

Kerrang is particularly fond of red headers and footers, as seen in the example magazine I have shown; white text on red is very clear and easy to see in terms of contrast, so Kerrang like to use this style in order to make certain that the user can see what is included within the issue. The background is kept rather simple so that attention is not drawn away from the main image on the page; this technique is one that a lot of other magazines tend to take after too

When designing my final magazine, I waned to take some of the best ideas from the magazines I researched into, and add some of my own ideas to create a new product. My front cover conveyed the red header, whilst varying with the black footer; I thought that giving this contrast of Red above and Black below would allow for a much more graphically pleasing look, and am happy with the final result. Some variations of the Kerrang front cover use rotated objects to add into the cover image giving it a 'messy' type of style which is something that I used for my front cover; text is very common for this style, as used for my cover for the header and the sub header. My contents is rather similar to that of Kerrang with positioning, I followed the concept of using a black box header with yellow text on the inside, one of the strongest contrasts of colours to help keep a very bold and easily seen style of header. My Front Cover follows the 'F' Pattern.

A style that I decided to input was to add subtitles into the titles underneath each header; I used this to give more details into some of the page titles and make the page seem more filled than it would without them. For the subtitles I used a dark grey in order to make sure that the reader knows what they are meant to focus on first and what they are supposed to focus on next. When it came to the 'Album Reviews' and 'Interviews' I used a simple list in a font 4px bigger than the rest of the font, without any subtitles so that it stuck out amongst the rest of the page. There were other sections of the contents that I mixed together elements of Subtitled titles and Non-Subtitled titles to give a sense of contrast.

My double page spread was a hybrid of an interview and a story on the artist I chose. I rendered out the person in the picture I used for my page and changed the background to be a gradient of a Light Grey, and a slightly Darker Grey; the way this was done is very apparent, and easy to notice with the white text being placed upon a darker background and the black text placed onto a light background. I used a mix of white text and red text for the header because I felt this worked as a nice contrast, and kept the body of the text black, as this is a very common style used within Kerrang and Mojo.