Evaluation Question 1- In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

When doing my textual analyisis, to begin with i looked at magazines such as Q, Kerrang and Mojo as i was unsure as to what genre my magazine was going to be. However I then began to steer in the dance genre and studied a magazine called DJ.

Due to looking at two completely opposite genres I saw both differences and similarities between the two. For instance, all magazines have a left alinement so that all of the writing on the front cover is in view of the audience. Although wanting my magazine to stand out I also wanted for it to appear professional so not only did I follow the alinement convention but I followed others too; All magazines' mast heads were centered or slightly to the left, this is due to how they are arranged on the shop shelves. Additionally when it came to images all real media products had one image on the front cover, so that it didn't appear too cluttered nor confuse the reader, however within the contents pages I found that there tended to be several images featured. In my opinion this is likely to help the product to sell as too much writing and very little image on the page can appear daunting to the reader when they open the product. I noticed that on the double page spread pages there was usually a main image and some text, which I liked the look of therefore applied it to my own media product because I think that appeared fuss- free and allowed the main subject of the article become of interest to the audience without them becoming distracted by anything. I also followed the convention of using bright colours and a noticable font (in my case, red, Stencil Std) as I believe it is attractive to they eye and catches peoples attention and therefore is likely to stand out amongst other magazines.

DJ magazine had males as the majority sex in their images, especially on the front cover, so I used a male student in my class to feature on my front cover, another male student to feature on my double page spread. However, I then included a female student on my contents page so that my product would appeal to both sexes. The mise-en-scene of the images were, inevitably DJ music as this is the genre of my magazine, so I included props such as caps, bracelets and the costume for the front cover subject was a baggy t.shirt- this follows the style of most DJ's.

I decided to use a range of different colours when constructing my magazine, the contrast between the red, green and white on the front cover contrast against the dark background. This is not typical amongst the real media products, however DJ magazine have a similar mis-matched theme, if you like.