Whilst designing and creating my music magazine, I had to abide by the conventions of real media music magazines, in order to make mine believable. Therefore before designing my music magazine, I analysed several front covers, double page spreads and contents pages in order to familiarise myself with the convention so it looked like a professional item and stands out on a magazine shelf in a shop. The first convention I followed would be the size of my pages, as most front page covers are an A4 size portray page using the format of width 21 cm and height 27.9 cm.
As I analysised different front page covers, I noticed they all use mastheads, taglines and a main image. Therefore I decided to use all these on my front cover too. However I had to do a lot of planning to make sure I was going to use them in an effective way to attract an audience to buy my magazine. Firstly I had to decide on a target audience so I could pick a genre for my magazine and make sure the conventions fitted with the genre and target audience I am aiming them at. However I had some trouble with this as originally as I was going to do ‘Hip Pop’ genre but the genre ‘Hip pop’ is mostly dominated by young black artists and I didn’t have any models that fitted that convention well. Therefore I decided to make my music magazine a mixed genre one like ‘NME’ as it would make the target audience wider, increase sales and appeal to almost anyone, this could be seen as unconventional because most magazines have a small target audience in mind for their product. To decide on a masthead for my music magazine I brainstormed a few names that I thought associated well with music or added a personal touch to my music magazine:
• Blast- associates with the sound of music.
• Pump- associates with the sound of music.
• Rave- a place where music is played.
• M- similarly to ‘Q’ just a one word letter that stands for music and also my name Miranda.
• MVP- similarly to ‘Nme’ but it stands for my initials.
• Flow- associated with music.
• Beat- associated with music.
• Remix- associated with music.
• Juke Box- something that is used to play music.
• Popular - the long name for pop music before it was shortened and also the fact its well known.
• Rhythm- associated with the sound of music.
All of these followed conventions as M is similar to Q, NME is similar to MVP and flow, beat and remix etc are similar to vibe. However I decided to pick Rhythm as I thought it conveyed the wide open genre of my magazine well and it also associated with all types of music, whereas Rave or Blast will be more associated with dance music and Remix or Beat more Hip pop music.
Then I had to pick a headline however I had to put a lot of thought into it, as this along with the main image would be the main attraction of my front cover. So I decided to analyse other music magazines and look at some headlines I thought grabbed my attention, one of my main inspirations was from Vibe magazine as it had a suggestively sexy picture of Beyonce with the headline “Beyonce strips down”, I particularly liked this as I thought it made me as the reader curious as to what she is striping down for, the image also related to the picture well. Therefore I made a list of stories I could use and decided to connect my front cover story to my double page spread story. Therefore I researched into this and the most conventional way of doing it is to do an interview on the double page spread that connects to the person on the front. Therefore I needed to think of a headline that would attract the audience to want to read the interview inside. These were a few of my ideas:
• ‘name of celeb’ reveals all.
• ‘name of celeb’ bares all.
• ‘name of celeb’ uncovered.
• Good girl, gone bad.
After a long thought process, I decided to choose “good girl, gone bad” as my main headline as it will make the audience curious as to how she has turn bad and make them want to buy the magazine to read inside. To accompany the main headline I have used a smaller headline saying “Chanel reveals all” to make it clear to the reader that there is an interview inside and also add to the curiosity of what she will be revealing inside to make the audience want to buy my magazine. Using to headlines, one main and the other a sub headline could be seen as unconventional as there is normally only one headline on most of the magazines I analysed.
After picking my headline I needed to capture a picture that would accompany it, as it is very unconventional where a headline does not relate to the image on the front. I choose my model wisely as I was going for a good girl, who is turning bad look. In order to portray a good girl, gone bad look I took an image where her face was at a slight angle, so I could darken one side of the image to symbolise her going over to the bad side. I thought this would make a unusual front cover image therefore it will grab the reader’s attention.
Along with the main story I also had to think of other taglines of other articles my magazine will contain as taglines are a big convention of not only music magazines but magazines in general, as if the reader isn’t interested in the main storyline a tagline may grab their attention instead. Here are some of the ones I thought of during my first planning stages:
•Bee's Hot Tours.
•Justin's Favourite Pick Up Lines.
•Summer Swagger.
•The ultimate summer playlist.
•Lil Hoods battle!
I used a few of these taglines however during the first stages of my planning, I originally planned to do a Hip pop magazine, so I had to alter a few of the names and change the storylines slightly in order for them to fit in with my final magazine.
After organising some of the bigger conventional things on a front cover, I started to analyse the smaller things that every music magazine contained. I found that every magazine contains an issue date and barcode of which it is normally of a small size in the bottom corner of a page. As in order to sell a magazine in a big industry e.g. Tesco you will need a barcode to process it through the till. Also barcode are convetionally white with black contrasting against them so they are read by the till.
Therefore I contained both of these conventions in mine, along with a website as many big publishing brands are now beginning to have online websites of the magazines or newspapers.
Although I stuck to most of the conventions, I challenged the conventions by not using a pug on my front cover but my double page spread instead.The reason I did not use a pug is because I feel as though it makes the front cover look crowded and messy.
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