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

Front Cover.

For the masthead I used a Sans Serif font. This conforms with the the usual conventions of real music magazines, for they typically use Sans Serif for titles and mastheads rather than body text. I also used a red font colour for the masthead as well as white and black for other sub-headings, which also follows general conventions of music magazines. Most magazines intentionally use black, white and one other colour (usually red) in their colour schemes, this is to create a sense of regularity and make it recognisable as a music magazine. In my opinion I believe that the red disrupts the flow of the black and white and is easily readable. As for the image, mine challenges the usual convention because the person is not looking directly at the camera whereas in other magazines such as VIBE the majority of the people on the front cover are looking directly at the camera.

Contents Page.

For the text inside my magazine and on the contents page I used a Serif font. Which is commmonly used as body text in most music magazines. However I still used it for the contents page title as well. My colour scheme of red, white and black continues into the the contents page from the front cover which is consistent with the forms of the real magazines because it formulates a sense of regularity within the magazine. In my magazine the subheadings of each topic within the magazine are alot larger and take up more space than in other music magazines, the main reason for this is that there arent as many pages to cover in mine, so i decided to make them bigger to emphasise what there is.

Double Page Spread.

For my double page spread, whilst continuing with my red, black and white colour scheme, I follow the forms of other magazines in some ways whereas in others I challenge them. For example, I have one large image offset to the side of my page like in alot of other double page spread designs. However I also have vey little in the background and overall it has quite a clean look, whereas in other designs there are alot of pictures and colours in the backgound. For the backgound colour (as I didn't have have an image covering all of it) I used white, mainly becuase it appears to be the colour of choice on the professional magazines, so I decided to conform to that.



Contents Page Comparison

I took an example from the contents page of VIBE magazine, which is a music magazine of the same genre as my one, and comapred it to the contents page of my magazine. Compared to most other magazine it shares the layout style as mine, where there is one main image with the text laid out around the main feature. The majority of other magazines I have seen have alot of other pictures and seem quite cluttered in my opinion. So I went for a more simplitsitc look. In the VIBE conetents page, the image is alot less saturated whereas mine still has a large variet of colour. Overall I felt the two different designs were very similar with, of course, subtle differences e.g. The title. Which I hope can allow my magazine to fit in but still stand out with other magazines.

Masthead Font

Music Magazine Front Cover Feedback

As with the school magazine front cover, I asked some of classmates if they could give me some feedback on my design and overall, there was more positive feedback than negative. The most common comment thats was made, was  that it keeps a clear colour scheme which is what I was aiming to do. After researching other music magazine covers one of the noticible factors that came up was the the vast majority of them have three main colours: Black, white and one other colour (usually red). Most of the negative comments where that it could be interpreted as a bit bland and boring. Which I think is true, however I didn't want to overload it with content to the point where it became messy.

My Music Magazine Front Cover

Vibe Magazine Analysis

Having finished my school magazine cover and contents, the next task is to create a music magazine cover so I have decided to research and analyse current  music magazine covers within the same genre of music as mine shall be. This issue of VIBE magazine follows the majority of conformities that most other music magazines do. For example, it predominantly uses three colours: Red, Black and White, which is common amongst successful music magazines. It uses different layers for the title, main image and the other text, which gives the magazine some depth and makes it stand out more clearly. Any extra space is crammed with other text about the contents of the magazine, i.e interviews, stories etc. Aswell as other articles that arent related to music but may still appeal to people who are a fan of this genre of music, which could help to broaden the target audience of the magazine.

Photoshop- Depth of Field Tutorial

This is a video tutorial that I created myself, outlining how to get a depth of field effect in post production using Adobe Photoshop CS5.1. The programs used in creating this consisted of Adobe Photoshop CS5.1, I used this program to actually create the effect demonstrated in the video, and Camtasia Studio 7, this program was used to record my screen as well as my voice and combined them together and published them straight to YouTube. YouTube was the video sharing site of my choice to upload to because of the fact that it was most compatible with Blogger, the site used for my blog.