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

In music magazines, there are many conventions that they tend to stick to, in the way of fonts, language, layout etc. For my magazine I stuck to many of the conventions of real music magazines in the market, and one of the most obvious ways I did this is on the front cover. My masthead is fairly bold, but also a small part of it is covered by the artists head, which is conventional of real magazines who are confident in their popularity enough to be able to do this. Also the choice of name for the magazine itself, ‘Beat Blast’, is conventional, in that it is simple like most music magazines, and also is in a way descriptive, for example the magazine ‘Kerrang’ is called that because of the noise a guitar makes, and Beat Blast refers to beats of a song.
The front cover is dominated mostly by the main cover image of the featured artist ‘Ryan Salt’, which is at a normal angle and is a medium close up, and there is a cover line to go with it, the largest on the page. At first the cover line was lower down near his jacket, but it was slightly difficult to tell whether the cover line went with the main picture or not, so I moved it up instead. Also there are things like the date, issue number and price in small print near the top which can be seen on a lot of magazines, as well as a slogan/tagline just below the masthead.
I have also used language that is conventional of real music magazines, as the articles are not too serious and formal like a newspaper, but more relaxed to make the reader feel like this is a casual magazine, and a fun magazine.
Finally, there is a group of cover lines of what else is included in the magazine, which is often seen on magazine covers. The language used in the cover lines is short and snappy, drawing the reader in but at the same time not giving too much away.

On the double page spread, the interview page reflects conventions of real magazines in many ways. There is a small introduction before the interview, talking about the interviewee, and one detail I noticed and included is that the very first letter of magazine articles is usually a lot bigger than the rest, so I also did this. Also, I set the interview out in regular columns, and used a size 10 font, as size 12 font looks too big when printed and unconventional of a magazine. The interview itself is conventional as it has a chatty style, and is not a formal interview, with some jokes between the interviewer and interviewee. It also had a focus on the favourite instrument of the artist I was interviewing, and on the opposite page their was a review of instruments that had been seen lately.

Finally the contents page I decided to split down into different sections instead of just listing the pages one after another. The sections were ‘news’, ‘reviews’ and ‘interviews’ and within these sections the pages were listed, which I found reflected conventions of real magazines after looking through them.

On the whole I think I was fairly successful in replicating usual conventions of magazines, and I found that as I moved various things around and resized them so they were more conventional, the magazine itself looked more professional.