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

Front Cover

Title

For the title of my magazine I decided on a name quite quickly after researching music magazines such as the NME, Big Cheese, Kerrang, Blunt and Spin. I chose to create a punk rock genre magazine and from that I got the idea for the title Warp from the famous Warped Tour. It is a touring music and extreme sport festival which first started in 1994 as being predominantly  punk rock music but now  features a more varied line up of music.

From these magazine titles I was able to research into what makes a logo bold and memorable. Each of these magazine logos are written in capital letters to make them eye-catching. They are simple and usually contain two or three colours which does not over complicate the design. For my magazine title I did follow the typical structure of magazine logos and designed Warp in capital letters. I used two colours (black and white) to keep the colours minimal.

However, I think that I have challenged the typical magazine logo as I have spread each letter out so that it is large logo and I have made distanced so that it is not entirely solid like the NME logo is and the colour used is mainly white with black creating shadow on the letters. I have not used red which seems to be a commonly used colour for magazine logos as it stands out but I feel that my logo is noticeable and because it is simple it is memorable.

Pictures

When researching the type of photographs that I should use for my front cover I decided to look at the poses that the artists were seen to be in on the covers of magazines such as the NME, Spin and Big Cheese. The artists or bands are usually seen to be showing quite a stern, intimidating facial expressions. These magazines are targeted at mid teens to people in their early twenties of both genders so the artists are usually seen to be posing maturely. Sometimes they can be seen to be revealing such as Brody Dalle on the cover of Blunt magazine featured in my earlier research. These magazines are rock/punk/indie genre music so the artists will not appear as they may do in pop magazines.

I believe that my front cover for Warp magazine has followed my research and as shown in this cover of Big Cheese magazine the band are photographed looking intimidating whereas mine artist could be comparably intimidating but has more of a 'stoner' look. The genre of both magazines is punk and the artist on my magazine could be described as having a 'I don't care' kind of facial expression. I have not used any other photographs of other artists or bands, similarly to the Big Cheese, because I wanted the reader's attention to be focused on the artist. The price of Big Cheese is £3.75 so I thought that because my magazine is similar it would be a reasonable price for the target audience to pay as they are likely to have jobs and would be interested in the content of the magazine.

Contents Page

The contents page for Warp is majorly based on the contents page from the NME. This is because I really liked the simplistic structure of a the actual contents listed on the left and the image on the right. As you can see I did not include a box with information about a gig as shown on the NME contents page as I did not feel that it was relevant and the reader could read that kind of information inside. Instead, I placed a few page numbers with text around the image to draw the reader in. Underneath the image I used the promotion of subscribing to the Warp magazine as shown on the issue of the NME. I felt that this would be an essential part of the contents page as it would attract more readers to subscribe to the magazine for a cheaper price as the normal price of the magazine would £3.75.

Double Page Spread



When researching for my double page spread I mainly looked at the two double page spreads shown on the right. This is because they are both fairly similar and were the type of layout that I wanted to use for my own double page spread. I used the idea of having a main photograph on the right page and overlapped it slightly onto the left page. The target audience of my magazine is roughly 15-21 year olds so I did not want to make it childish and use lots of images. I liked the big title used on both of my research so I also did this and used different fonts to highlight certain words. Instead of including a small box with information shown in the top research spread, I used a quotation from the interview which I think the target audience would respond to and want to read the interview. The interview is written for the chosen audience and is not written too formally but is easy to read.

All of my final products link together with the research that I have done into specific areas of music magazines. I did not use every single piece of my research as some of it I did not feel was relevant but I mainly stuck to the layout and structures of the magazines that I have researched. The misc-en-scene of bar codes, page numbers, contents of the magazine are similar to those in my research. I think that my target audience of mid teens to early twenties would find my magazine suits their levels of maturity and can be read by both genders as it is not aimed at just boys or girls.