Conventions Homework

1. Which were the most influential conventions for you? How did your study of them affect your decisions and outcomes?

When making my music magazine for AS, I was following an Indie style genre. I looked at existing magazines such as NME and Q a lot to get inspiration and ideas to make my own. With my theme in mind I was looking out for things such as colours used, font style and size, and the overall house style of the magazines. Both of the magazines had a large title at the top of the page that always stayed the same, I decided that my magazine would have the same so it stands out and people would be able to tell straight away what it is.

I decided to keep the colours of the written parts of the double page spread the same, this made it easier to read. I chose the colours carefully and so it would suit my theme of magazine, I used a burgundy colour as the interview was with girls and I thought the colour fitted well with an indie image.

I also put adverts in my magazine, in NME they had an advert on the contents page, I thought this worked well as its the first page you see so I decided to put a subscription advert on my contents page.

After not doing very much of this for my preliminary task I could tell the difference. The final look of my magazine looked far better than the practise one. After studying existing magazines I had a much better outlook and higher knowledge of what to put in mine.

2. Did you subvert any conventions that you studied in the music magazines?

Not really, I did play about with a few things like the heading of the magazine; I moved it around the page a bit but ended up keeping it at the top as I thought this worked best. Everything else that was in my magazine I kept similar to already existing magazines like NME. Due to lack of creation I didn't explore too much with it.