Evaluation Questions:

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

My magazine uses all the same forms and conventions of real music magazines, such as a extensively planned and researched masthead designed by me:

an in depth interview for double page spread content that I wrote myself, six photos that I took and digitally manipulated myself

a large amount of sophisticated content for the contents page and inside cover written entirely by me

tag lines, strap lines and a slogan for the cover of the magazine

I also designed a common theme for my magazine to follow, a select four fonts to be used

a colour scheme to stick to, and a layout guide

The language used in my content is the same as the type of language used in most hip hop publications I researched; a mix of formal and informal language, generally detailed technical music knowledge, with the odd slang or colloquialism here and there. My magazine also sticks to forms and conventions of hip-hop publications in the way that it shares common visual motifs of hip-hop, such as use of iconography like microphones, chains, and hoodies.

However, my music magazine also develops some forms and conventions of hip-hop magazines, such as my house theme. The majority of hip hop publications I researched had very basic, obvious layouts and brightly coloured pages, very detailed and stylised mastheads, and an overall, childish, over excessive style,

whereas I designed my magazine to be much more sombre, exercising the rule of “less is more”, keeping my masthead simple, but not boring, a minimal use of colours, the majority of the magazine being either black or white, two colours designers use frequently to create a sense of simplicity or power, them being the most striking colours. My magazine has a dark theme, dimly lit photos, dark textured backgrounds, and an almost medieval font in the masthead, this kind of styling would usually be seen in rock and metal publications

rarely seen in hip-hop, I chose to do this to reflect a new underground scene within hip hop that has a much darker feel to it, and therefore wanted to develop hip hop conventions in my magazine to continue this new trend. My magazine also challenges some forms of hip-hop magazines, such as the front cover layout. When I researched hip-hop publication covers, the only types of covers I saw were once that featured a photo of a hip hop artist filling the entire magazine cover, with a masthead, a tag line, and some names of other artists or names of articles inside placed on top.

I tried this layout, placing my writing and masthead on top of my front cover photo

but I didn’t like how it looked, I found it too boring and felt that this style had been overdone, so I looked into more dynamic magazine cover layouts, and found one for a surfing magazine layout, that had photos floating on the cover in there square shape, the borders of the photo in view, with other writing and mastheads floating next to the photo, and a background cover behind it all

I liked this style much more and created a variation of it for my magazine cover.