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

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

My final cover features all the conventions of a real magazine cover page. The purpose of the cover page is to  make a magazine stand out from those displayed around it so the key to its success is a really strong image of someone the audience recognises and likes. Cover pages also need a strong masthead. Other conventional details include a cover story, usually in large text, cover lines to promote the magazine's contents, a bar code and dateline. Some also include additional features.

My cover page has a strong masthead. It is different from other most mastheads in that the font size and style is small and italic but I still think that it is strong for who I want to target. It is feminine in terms of colour and font choice and the name I have chosen is strikingly unexpected. I wanted to be ironic in order for people to remember the name so I chose something that could be read in different ways. I chose to place it at an angle so it looked soft and not stamped on the page. This offered contrast to the name itself.

For the main image I chose a close up and a subjective gaze because my research showed that these are the covers that young women are most attracted to. I placed the image on the right of the page so that I had space down the left side for the coverlines.

I included cover lines to attract the audience and make them want to buy and read the magazine. If I didnt include a variety of cover lines, then my product would fall short in pulling in a wider audience. I wanted to use variety of recent music, bands and solo artists as my audience have varied tastes.

I kept the colour range limited to three colours which matched the feminine style and picked out colours from the photograph. I reduced the spaces between the lines of text to make the cover feel more crammed with interesting features.

click to go to flickr!

final piece pic
Originally uploaded by charl_eastwood

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

dps final piece 2
Originally uploaded by charl_eastwood

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

This is my second part of this question. I wanted to go for a DPS design that was less than conventional so that the reader might be attracted to it. The extra photos on the top right add interest and variety to the page and women like to see before and after type shots of celebrities. I have added a translucent gradient curtain effect using Photoshop so that I could have a blank space for my text. This also created slight sense of mystery around the artist as you can see her but not completely. It adds to her mystique but she is still gazing directly at the reader. The last point I would say that makes it unconventional is the subtitle "INTERVIEW" this shows you the genre which you would expect but in a different form and its faded behind the text so it doesn't steal too much attention. I resisted using pull quotes and a drop cap because these conventional layout devises just wouldn't go with the way that I wanted to layout my text and images on the page.

On the other hand, the things that make it conventional are the bold Title, which shows you what the article on the dps is about, the big photo with a subjective look is very conventional, which is what you would expect as it makes the reader feel more involved. These are all typical of a dps, but the components i used are more unconventional weighing my dps out to be more unique.

If you click on the photo you can see an annotated version of my dps on flickr, for a closer look.