Q1 In what way does your media product use, develope or challenge forms and convenions of real media products?

My magazine is a Metal magazine so I naturally conformed to a large amount of conventions for Metal Magazines. To do this, I referred back to my similar product research, I re-examined some earlier issues of Kerrang and other metal magazines. I found that a recurring feature of metal magazines was the dark colour scheme which complements the genre. From this information I decided to make my magazine consist mostly of dark red and black with some white. I kept the same colour scheme throughout my front page, contents and double page spread. I also took colours into account when thinking about my photos. The feature band is wearing mostly black T-shirts which I find is quite common amongst the majority of metal bands.

Magazines rely a great deal on their mast head to make their magazine eye catching. The mast head is what makes the magazine recognizable to potential audiences, so I felt that I really need to make my mast head original and unique. Metal magazine’s mast heads also tend to have a destructive and rebellious theme and image. In order to create the best possible mast head I went online and found some tutorials for creating different text styles. I managed to create a mast head with a ‘broken down’ kind of feel to it, which I find is quite suiting for the genre of music and my target audience. I also hope this will help grab the attention of buyers. In the top banner of my front cover I have included a small list of things my magazine will cover such as: “news”, “reviews” etc. In the bottom banner on my front page, I have included a list of Band names that are going to be featured in my magazine. All the band names are of the metal genre or a sub genre of metal, bands such as: ‘Lamb of God’, ‘Asking Alexandria’, ‘Iron Maiden’, etc.

I have modelled my contents page loosely on the layout of the contents pages of ‘Kerrang’ magazine. The different categories are written in dark red and are emphasized with a black border. The page numbers are also in dark red but aren’t highlighted with a black box. My images however do not mirror the layout of the images on the contents page of Kerrang. I have my main feature image at the top and the other images are below it. I noticed that a most issues of magazines have an ‘editor’s note’ column on their contents page so I too have included one to tell the audience what they can expect to find in the magazine.

My double page still stays with the current colour scheme with black headers and red text. I have followed the typical conventions of magazine double page spreads as I have made the introductory text bold and separated the questions and answers by changing their colours, the questions being in red and the answers in black. In the header and footer I have included page numbers, the website, the date, and the band name and article.