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

As you can see here, I based my main idea of my double page spread on the magazine Q. As I mentioned in previous posts, I love the layout of Q and how it has great structure yet it also very creative and minimal. Q magazine also helped me to design my front cover and contents page with it's layout of images and text.

I felt keeping a house style running throughout my magazine was important so
that the reader gets familiar with the magazine and can identify it on a shelf without having to read the mast head.

I have constructed my double page spread so that it follows similar conventions of a typical music magazine. In comparison to Q magazine, there is the main image of the artist/band on one side of the page, and then text in two columns on the other side. By following similar music magazines, gave me ideas and enabled me to pick up the typical conventions, therefore making it easier for me to design my own magazine. As you may of spotted immediately, Q magazine gave me the inspiration for using a large letter behind the text. If it wasn't obvious already, the letter represents the artists/bands first name which in this case, the 'M' represented 'Megan'. I felt this was quite a cool, edgy idea which fitted in with my independent genre, as well as reinforcing the importance of my artist. I also felt doing this gave plain, simple text a more fun and creative look, therefore making the audience want to read it. In the Q magazine demonstrated above, I noticed how there was some text on the image, which is why I thought it would be unique to input a quote next to the model, to reinforce the artists personality and give the audience something extra to read. This was one reason for positioning the quote here, but the second reason was due to me originally placing a smaller picture on the bottom left, meaning there was an empty space left on the other side of her. I felt placing the quote here would complete the double page spread and make everything intertwine very neatly.
When editing the photo I was very keen on sticking to the 'vintage' style theme as seen on the front cover and contents. As the images are very similar to each other, it wasn't too hard to maintain this. I also thought by sticking to the same fonts and colours would help me to achieve the look I wanted and make it look very structured and professional throughout the magazine.

As you can probably see from above, the magazine 'Q' had once again helped me to design the layout of my contents page. I noticed how 'Q' had stuck to their red white and black house style by highlighting the sub heading and page numbers in red, and then putting the rest of the text in black. I really liked this idea as I felt it looked really controlled and precise, which is why I used the models sweater to contrast with the page number and sub headings, creating a structured link of importance between the two. I found this also makes the contents page easier to read and navigate around. However, my contents page isn't exactly the same as 'Q' as I found there was quite a large amount of text on their contents which I wasn't keen on having, as I found this made the page look a little cramped and clustered, therefore I chose a few major headings and surrounded them by larger images, making the contents more boisterous.

As I felt that my magazine was slightly more bias for girls, I decided to add the image of a boy band... in this case it was 'arctic monkeys', as they were a familiar indie-rock band which both males and females admired in this genre of music.

I chose to continue using the colour burgundy so that it would create a flow throughout my magazine, as the colour was used on the front cover to highlight the mast head and topic headings, as well as being used on the double page spread when highlighting the page number and artists name.