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

Text:

When creating my magazine, I had to take into account the styles and conventions that are incorporated in magazine already available to me target audience. As my magazine is focusing on the Heavy Metal genre I decided to focus on magazines such as Kerrang and Metal Hammer.  

To assure my magazine will be eye-catching and interesting to my target audience, I chose a yellow colour scheme that will be recognised with my magazine and will attract my audience’s eyes when browsing the magazine section at a shop.  The target audience that I am trying to reach is aged between 14-28, which would be both genders but is primarily a male audience.  

My Front Cover

One of the most important elements on any front cover is the masthead, this has to be eye-catching enough to gain interest from people; but has to be simple enough so that it does not draw the eye away from the front image.  In Kerrang’s case, they have gone for a very distorted look; while keeping it quite simplistic. I have tried to achieve the same effect with a lightning bolt behind the name of my magazine; Voltage.

Secondly, the cover image (which is normally a full bleed of the main article in the magazine) is a very important element of any magazine.  It will be one of the first things a person will look at and needs to define your magazine to attract the right audience, I have used an image on location with the three models wearing band hoodies to tell the audience what type of band they are from just a first glance.

The sell lines on the front cover are also useful, they tell are there to ‘sell’ the magazine with more information about the contents of the magazine. I have chosen to keep with the yellow cover scheme and have used bands like; Lamb of God and Iron Maiden to reinforce the metal genre in my magazine.

Contents

My main focus on my contents was obviously the articles in the magazine, but also the important use of the subscription feature for my magazine and social networking such as Facebook and YouTube. I have stuck with the colour scheme again to achieve a brand identity for my magazine. For the images and titles, I needed them to stand out so I edited the images to black and white and used red text to stand out from the yellow.

Double Page Spread

My first double page spread is introducing the main article with a main image of the four band members and a pull quote from the article. I have stayed true to the yellow colour scheme as well as a red colour scheme for the article. The font used for the pull quote works well with the metal genre and conforms to the styles of other magazines like Kerrang.

My second page features the bulk of my article and a unique character profile which gives an insight into what the band members are like. This will be very popular among my target audience because they are the type of people that like to know more than the average metal music listener. I have also used more unique fonts to make the text more interesting, and to add a more of a metal look to the names on the profiles. I was inspired to do this by looking at Kerrang’s titles and fonts.