AS Media Studies Foundation Portfolio: 2016

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

Front Cover

Here's an example of a current front cover with the conventions labeled

Masthead

Examples

My Masthead

My masthead adheres towards the conventions of mastheads featured on other music magazines mainly rock genre magazines. Moreover my masthead follows the bright contrasting red and white colour scheme and uses a bold font to help it stand out from amongst over magazines on the shelf as well as attract the young adult target audience. It is featured on the upper left hand side of the front cover, this helps the magazine be displayed more easily. The placement position also makes the masthead more noticeable as naturally the top left of a page is the first place we look, due to the direction we read. Furthermore my masthead follows the convention of using sans serif font, I chose to adhere to this convention as this style looks professional as well as eye catching.

Main Feature Story

Main feature stories generally follow the convention of being a large font, this allows the story to stand out well and attract the audience. With the artist name written in a unique font compared the rest of the text present on the front cover featured above the sub-genre 'Indie Genre On The Rise?', the artist name stands out well. The main feature story also adheres towards the convention of having smaller text below the artist name explaining the style of the article. Moreover the background of unconventional colours such as yellow and cyan behind the sub-genre text attracts the eyes of the audience due to their unconventional presence on a front cover. Similarly the more conventional background colour of red behind 'on the rise' is eye-catching due to the contrast of white text overlapping it.

Magazine Colour Scheme
The conventional colours within a rock genre magazine colour scheme generally stick to white, black/gray and red. For my magazine I adhered to this colour scheme to an extent as well as incorporating eye-catching colours such as yellow and cyan to further engage the audience.

Bar Code
My magazine front cover design uses the convention of a bar code featured at the bottom right of the page. This feature is incredibly important because it allows the magazine itself to be scanned therefore allowing the magazine to be purchased at a shop.

Overlapping
One convention of music magazines is overlapping. This is conventionally used to suggest a busy and crowded feel through the front cover. This crowded, non-formal convention generally targets those in a lower social class who want to buy a good value magazine. On my magazine cover I used overlapping as it allowed me link text together and contribute to the busy tenor I was aiming to give off as well as engage with this lower social class

Price
Moreover my magazine follows the convention of displaying the price above the bar code at the bottom right of the magazine front cover. This convention is also important as it informs buyers of the price to know how much they are paying for the magazine

Issue/Date
One of the conventions of a magazine front cover is to include the issue or date of when the magazine was released. Within my front cover I adhered to this convention as it is crucial to show the audience when the particular issue of that magazine was released/published.

Overall the front cover of the magazine is very eye catching. The yellow and cyan neon colours on the cover are striking and engage the audience. Moreover the use of red and white as well as black and yellow contrast well similarly the fonts used as well as the colour scheme of the magazine definitely captures the readers eyes. Throughout my magazine I used conventional colours for a rock music magazine such as red, white and black. Furthermore I also used bright, neon colours such as yellow and cyan on my magazine to appear more attractive and unique in an aim to create an exclusive tenor as well as to make the magazine stand out.

One convention of front covers is that secondary feature artist names are written in capitalised letters in order to show their importance. On my cover I followed this convention by using capital letters to emphasise the artists popularity and importance. Moreover the font used is unique compared to the rest of the text on the page. As well as this I used a black stroke layer to contrast with the white text, making the text more visually appealing and eye catching and overall making the names more noticeable.

Throughout my magazine I reused the mast head and sub-logo created out of the 'a' of Beatroot to look like an exclamation mark to reinforce the magazine brand identity. At the footer of each page the name of the magazine is featured as well as this exclamation mark. Moreover on the contents page of my magazine the 'a' is featured as a symbol below the page numbers and has the main artist name overlapping it. This links the magazine brand to the artist.

Contents Page

I used the convention of having the main artist featured on the background of the page as this will have the most interest of readers. Moreover the article on this main artist is featured mid way in the magazine as to entice readers to read more than just this main story. On the contents page I also used sub text under some artist that give additional information that will engage the readers more and entice them to read said articles.

Page Numbers

Quite likely the most important convention of the contents page is page numbers. They allow the reader to navigate the magazine and inform the reader of which artists have featured articles within the magazine. Within my contents page I displayed the page numbers next to their according artists.

Amount of Pages

My magazine is priced at £2.90 and is a monthly magazine, therefore it has around 80 pages with the main and feature stories ending on page 68.

DPS

Underneath the crow feature story I used a yellow background aiming to make it highlight the text overlapping it by making it look like gaffer tape (a tape used by sound mechanics in the music industry).

Looking at my reader profile you can see that I aimed to target my magazine at young adults. I did this as the genres represented within the magazine have the widest range within this age range of 19-23. On one hand I didn’t want to make my magazine too childish nor too mature or boring so that it would appeal to people throughout this age region. I do however want the branding to be relatively sophisticated so that it would stick out and be memorable.

At the beginning stages of my magazine planning and creation I created a survey using survey monkey asking questions that would later prove helpful for the creation and design of my magazine. I aimed the questionnaire primarily at youth who were involved with interests in the genres that I aimed to represent in my magazine. Therefore the results would more likely represent the target audience that I aimed my magazine at.
My survey asked questions spanning from standard demographics such as age and gender as well as including several psycho-graphic questions such as how they listen to music and how often they did so as well as how often they go to gigs etc.

After looking through the results the final results helped me decide how I would go about designing my magazine and the main artist as well as creating a rough demographic and target age that ended up being elderly- teenage to young adult.

The results also showed that the main gender my audience was female however I believe this may be because the people who I asked to do the survey were largely female, ergo males were less likely to answer the survey. However, I knew from personal knowledge that that indie/rock/alternative genres appealed to males equally if not more so I had to design my magazine in order to appeal to both genders. Especially because my reader profile target males over females.