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

2. The title
O the title of my magazine follows the conventions of the real
media product kerrang! Magazine, as you can see both fonts are
bold and in capitals. I used a font called Truskey from
www.dafont.com as I wanted to take it one step further than
kerrang! And have all of the holes in the lettering covered and
more erosion going through the text. Both titles have
connotations of music as Kerrang! Is an onomatopoeic sound
that an electric guitar would make which identifies the product as
being associated with rock music, similarly I chose to call my
magazine amplified which has connotations of loud music as you
use an amplifier to amplify the music you are playing and rock
concerts famously have lots of large ones on the stage. I further
edited the title in Photoshop to give it a reddish tinge as I found
that a lot of rock magazines used the colour red, I did not want
my whole title to be red so using the tint airbrushing tool I gave it
a slight red tint.

3. People in the magazine
O The models I used for magazine also follow conventions of my
chosen genre magazine. Their appearance is typical for the rock
genre of checked shirts; band t-shirts, dark colours, jeans, military
boots with dark hair and piercings. My cover model Aaron, has
similar to style to that of Enter Shikari and 30 seconds to mars, who
are regular cover artists for Kerrang, Rock sound and NME, he had
a unique and interesting look which looked great in the images I
had taken with the contrast turned up really high. My second model
Becca, is an actual singer who sings acoustic songs but wears a lot
of dark clothing who I thought is similar to the lead singer of lacuna
coil, but she also challenges the conventions as there is not many
female artists who feature in rock magazines but I thought that I
should use a female model as well so that the magazine is not
gender biased. Lastly my photos of local bands fit the conventions
as they were all rock bands similar to the likes of Arctic Monkeys
and You Me At Six.

4. Text
O I placed colours boxes behind some of the
text so that it was easier to read, and so
that it stood out, I got this idea from this
issue of NME where the majority of the
text is in small black boxes.

5. Contents Page
O I think the montage of photos is quite
conventional for a magazine along with
the page numbers on the photo, I
arranged my features into 5 sections
that after researching I thought a music
magazine would have, I named the
fourth one backstage pass as it has
further connotations of music, and
entices the reader into the articles as it
sounds more interesting than behind the
scenes. I also put some information
about the free cd that my magazine
comes with in a box at the bottom as I
found most magazines who gave away
freebies did not give that much
information about them and quite often
just had a small box in the contents. In
addition to this to carry on the rock look I
added distressed and eroded graphics
and text to fill the white spaces and
make the page more appealing.

6. Double Page Spread
O I think my double page spread is quite conventional as it has a
colour scheme of red and black which is commonly seen in rock
genre magazines, I but the text in black boxes which had ink
and paint splats around to symbolise the rebellion and rough
look the audience identify with. I also added the ‘amplified
playlist’ box which I hadn’t seen in magazines but found the
quite often had small boxes of information and I thought the
reader would probably be interested in the artists music choices
so I added this.