Evaluation 1
In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Within this evaluation I will be discussing the conventions of a hip hop/ urban magazine I have researched on such as The Source, Vibe and Flavour magazine. My music magazine consists of a front cover, a contents page and a double page spread, all influenced by these magazines. The three images below have been printscreened from the software Photoshop. They show photos I had taken of my model that I could have potentially used for my front cover. To attract my audience I would need a dominant image that would ultimately stand out. In addition, because my magazine is urban oriented I wanted everything about the model to evoke that message that being the choice of costume, the NVC etc. He first print screen image of the model I found to be to common with the hand gesture although I wanted to evoke the urban lifestyle I didn’t want the magazine to feel too close to home. The second image was the definite image I would use for the front cover. I had covered some editing in Photoshop by using a contrast and several other things however the image came across unnatural so I decided to not use it. The final image is the one that I chose to use for the front cover I did limited editing to the picture and I was happy with the results. This print-screen is another experiment I tried for my magazine front cover
Before I decided to use Vibe magazine for inspiration to create my media product, a similar magazine institution called The Source was initially my first. As you’ll maybe be able to notice I tried to re-create the neon blue effect on my model similar to the source magazine featuring p-diddy on their cover. I manage to create this effect using the glow tool on Photoshop however I found this not to be appropriate for a magazine cover so again I decided not to use it.
I believe that I challenged the convections of my contents page when looking at the source and vibe magazines contents page. My contents page appears totally different in comparison to the magazines. For instance the contents page banner for vibe magazine is split up. Secondly they also feature a logo within the background expressing ‘V’ for vibe. That is a feature that I may challenge because I do not have a logo for my media product which partially could be a good or bad thing. The images used in vibe contents page are quite simple and bold furthermore most of the images they use cover most of the page. In my contents page I have used smaller images and made the copy take over the page. This shows I have challenge the convection of images because perhaps Vibe uses large images to capture the readers and allow the artist featured to stand out. I have not used big images because I would rather the copy stand out. The colour scheme of my contents page is a contrast in comparison to the colour scheme of vibe they tend to use grey’s and dull colour with gradients however again I challenged this and I used a bright colours because I feel the appearance should always keep a reader interested and with vivid colours perhaps might do so.
The contents page from the source perhaps could suggest a similarity because there are features that are similar to my contents page. For instance the banner is underlined like mine. The reason I chose to underline was because I wanted my banner to evoke dominance over the copy below it. Also, the source magazine used red to perhaps make it clearer to win. I chose to use red for the exact same reasons and to show the heading on what artist are going to be on each page. Likewise, the colour scheme from the source is partially similar to vibe using tedious colours, hence why I decided to challenge this and use more vibrant colours.