In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of media products?

I wanted my music magazine to be a bit like Blender and Spin, which I think are the best ones and have a nice contemporary design. I followed a lot of the conventions of modern magazine design to get it to look how I wanted it.

I wanted the masthead to look quite simple and defined, so I simply typed it using all capitals formatting and then followed an idea of covering it with the main photograph, giving it the effect that it's standing out.

I think it looks good when magazines have text against a background, so it almost looks like it has been cut out, but in a neat way. So I decided to use this idea on the cover. I put some of the text in bold so it makes the main statement, like the cover line in itself. I put a record behind the cover line 'spin that record babe' which would seem familiar as a lot of cover lines are in circles, but I made it so it would seem like a circle, but also relate to the text.

One of the ways I went against conventional design was to change the colour balance of the cover photo, making the band appear a shade of pink. I thought it looked like an 80s sleeve design and it also fit in with my colour scheme. A lot of music magazines are made to look like the genre they're about, which is what I tried to do, since indie music is about taking something simple and giving it a new twist, like dance.

On the contents page I put some text in a box with a border, which separates it from the rest of the page and looks good as well. I put a photo by line and a bit about the environment to make it more realistic.

I had a very basic drop cap of 15 lines on my double page spread. I changed the colour to the same pink used on the rest of the story, but I didn’t think it looked as good as it does in black. I also thought it should have a pull quote, but I didn’t want it to be stuck in the middle of the text in a boring way. Instead I placed it in a circle at the bottom of the page, with different fonts and formatting and colours. Pull quotes draw attention to the quote and why it has been said, which persuades readers to read the article and find out. When it is something interesting or funny it sets the tone for the article. I also put a pull quote from the article on the contents page with a direction to it, which will create interest.

The finishing touch was a caption on the first page of the double page spread, listing the brands of clothing worn by the band. This is a typical convention in music magazines and I think it adds something to the page, especially since my music magazine is also about fashion.