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

As you can see my product is very similar to the real thing. Firstly both products are titled to indicate that this is the contents page. Also both products use images from to advertise stories/features within the magazine, these images include the page number on which the article can be found. Lastly my product and the real thing are similar through their use of headings for different categories e.g. events. I feel my contents page challenges that of the real thing. It does this by its use of bright colours and shapes and carrying the magazine logo onto the contents. I actually feel that my contents page is more appealing than the real thing!

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

As you can see here is my front cover compared against a dance magazine, mixmag which would be a main competitor. Both my logo and the logo of the competing magazine are placed behind the main image. This gives it a more professional look. Both mine and the the competitor use bold headings to promote the main story. I have used 3 colours through out my magazine and stuck to that colour scheme as using too many colours can make it look to busy and cluttered and messy. As you can see the competitor does this and it wasnt until find this image that i realised the colours are very similar!

Both mine and the competitor highlight features theough the use of custom shapes. I have used a circle, whereas mixmag has used an arrow

Evaluation

This is my evaluation of my final finished product. I will present this evalutation in two ways. Firstly i will go through a power point slide by slide with explanation of each slide. I will then post a written evaluation with my final front cover, contents page and double page spread.

Front cover

As you can see, after starting early and working all day! I have finished my front cover :)
I am very pleased with this and i feel it looks very professional and identifies with dance music, i shall post a full evaluation at a later date!

Attracting readers

I know that i need to attract readers. I have looked at other magazines and what attracts me to them. To attract readers i have used some simple shapes, like in the picture above. I have made it bright, and kept it simple by using only 3 colours, yellow, aqua/blu and black. I have made the majority of the writing black so it stands out on the yellow and is eay to read. I tihnk this will draw in readers.

Update

This is just a brief update as to how my front cover is looking so far. As you can probably tell it is not going to look like my original plan, When actually crating my front cover i felt my plan was too busy, and i needed to keep it simple. You can see in the top right corener i have created a torn page effect with a green background, on top of this green background i shall use a small image and som text to highlight a feature within the magazine. So far i am plased with this. I feel proud of myslef as when i first started this i really hated photoshop, i'd never used it before and couldnt get along with it. I let the fact that other people were good with it get to me, but then i really made an effort to get along with it, everyone is a novice in the beginning! I thoguht about effects and looked around the internet for some tutorials, this really helped me and i now feel quite confident with this software :)

Logo

1

2
As you can see above are two logos i have created for my magazine. At first i thought my logo should look bubbly and and bright and so i created the green one(1) you can see above. I thoguht this was really good as it looks plasticy and shiny and uses neon green a common colour associated with dance music. However after i thoguht more i felt the logo wasnt very good. This was because at looking other magazine logos i saw they are all very simple, mainly one colour and none have any special effects. This makes them easy to read and easy to repeat. I realised this as when i tried to repeat the green logo it proved to be very difficult as to make it look shiny and such like it consists of many layers. this made it hard to repeat as i had to copy each and every layer and then line them on top of each other.


I then created the blue logo(2). I liked this better as it looked simple and was easy to repeat. it still uses a bright coulour and still looks familiar to dance music.
From producing a logo i learnt that sometimes you want to try and use alot of special effects because you tihnk this will be the best and look impressive. However sometimes the simple and easier option is often best. Making things look too complicated can put readers off as they may get an impression that this is what the rest of the magazine will look like. I shall keep this in mind .