Evaluation: 1.In What Ways Does Your Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products?

My product has conventions that use and challenge forms of other products that are exist.

The first way that my product is similar to existing ones is because of the layout. All magazines have similar layouts, but depending on the genre of the magazine some might be different compared to others. For example, NME is based on a different genre, whereas my own is based on the 'Dance Music' genre, which can be seen through how the layout is different. While everything on the NME magazine is colorful and bold, my own magazine has everything much smaller. Also, the mastheads are an example of this because of the fonts, boldness and the colour of them which suggests that each genre has a different take and the conventions may not always be similar.

My Own Masthead. Font Used: Gulim

When it came to finding the right font that would match the genre, I decided to look on the website '1001fonts.com' for inspiration. The image above shows they different types that I thought would be effective to decide on how I wanted my masthead to look. Each of them have a link to the dance music genre, and for me to create my masthead, I decided to use something similar. Because 'Mix-mag' was a big influence on how my final product looked, I decided to use the 'Gulim' font and make it bold, before enlarging it so that it would create a simple but effective look. I didn't want the masthead to be bold, but I wanted it to stand out. This challenged the form of conventions because I decided to do something different, rather than using bold like existing magazines, I decided to keep it simple and by having the font white and large it made it stand out against the red background.

Colour scheme has been an important part of the conventions of magazines. All of them are used on the front cover and sometimes through out the rest of the magazine. For my colour school, I mainly chose bright colours, except for the black which was to make the brighter colours stand out, which many other magazines do as well.

 The main feature stories are usually centered in the middle of the magazines front cover. I followed the conventions of the dance music and did this with my own. By having a bold font which is eye capturing, this is typical and because the main images are there, this also helps create the main feature story so the audience know who they're going to be reading about.

The barcode allows the customer to buy the magazines, and without it they wouldn't be able to. The price of my magazines is £2.00, I decided on this price because I thought that it was reasonable and the fit well for the audience that I was aiming the product at.