Convention questions

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

Throughout the design and planning process for my magazine project, I looked up current music magazines that are out there already so I not only had something to boost my own ideas, but so I knew what had already been done. Coming up with original ideas can be quite difficult if you've never made a music magazine before, but because I had researched into ones that are big and on sale now, I knew what was working well with its buyers. Things like giving the front cover a big photo of a popular band  and saying you've done an interview with them. This will stand out to fans and draw them into buying the magazine as they want to read and find out things. So I took this into consideration and even though it's done constantly with other magazines, I tried to make my image slightly different before placing it on the front cover. This change was having only selected areas of the image in colour and the rest in black and white. Even though it is only a minor change and has probably been done before somewhere, I thought it gave my magazine that bit of originality.

The names of some current music magazines are either really obvious to what the genre of the magazine is such as 'NME', or there are really random names such as 'Music Planet' which could realistically be about any type of music out there today.

2. Did you subvert (go against) any conventions that you studied in the music magazine project?

I did end up going against particular conventions such as the layout of the front cover. I went against it by wanting to place my ideas in particular ways rather than just straight forward onto the page. I wanted to change the angle of the text and also put the text on top of my images.