Evaluation Question 1

1.

To make my magazine I used a lot of different conventions to make it look authentic. I tried to make my cover look a lot like this issue of Rock Sound magazine. To begin with I even used the same colour scheme to fit in with my magazine. One of the conventions which I used in my magazine was that I used a house style of Red, Yellow and White.
For my cover I used a number of different stereotypical features in just about every single music magazine. On the cover there is a masthead at the top, featuring the0 name of the magazine in bold letters with a special effect. There is also a price, issue number, barcode, and date of release like there is with every other music magazine.
As is similar to the cover of this magazine, I used a lot of different band names on the cover of the magazine. This is to create interest in the reader who is seeing the magazine cover from afar.
There are several ways which I challenged this magazine cover as well as a lot of music magazines. In the masthead, I wrote the name of the magazine over the “Headstock” of an actual electric guitar. I thought that this was a good idea as it clearly displayed the kind of music that the magazine was about – rock.
The photos that I used in my magazine followed the conventions that I was taught. I made sure that the person that the reader would think was the “ideal partner” was at the front of the picture on the front cover. Another convention that I made sure was present on my front cover picture was that I made sure that each of the members of the band on the front cover were looking into the photo, and that the photo was a medium close up shot.
For my contents page I tried to copy the design of the popular magazine Kerrang! A number of elements that I copied were that I used big chunky letters in the headings, using drop shadows on each of the coloured text boxes to make them stand out. An element that I added on my own on the contents page is that the text box that I put the page number for my main article I slanted, so it looked like someone had just thrown it on. Also down the top right hand side of my magazine I pasted my original masthead and turned it sideways down the side to give a stylised effect that I think worked really well.
I used the main splash from an interview with Paramore that was featured in the Kerrang issue 1260 which was released on the 6th of May. I basically copied the design to make it look more professional, though I used a number of elements of my own. For my background shot, I cut out the members of the band on Photoshop, and put a rainbow neon effect behind them. I thought that this would make the page look more exciting. Something else that I did different from the magazine is that I made sure that all of the text boxes in the magazine were equally sized, this was different to the Kerrang issue, of which all text boxes varied in their height and width.