Evaluation - 1 - Conventions

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

This is an existing magazine front cover from Vibe magazine. I have shown it's conventions and used L.I.I.A.R analysis.

I have used similar conventions on my music magazine.

By using conventions such as Masthead it is clear to see the title of the magazine allowing the audience to see the title of the magazine clearly. Also by using the featured artists then the audience can see who is featuring in the magazine, if they are a fan of any of those artists then they will be encouraged to buy the magazine.

First of all to be consistent I needed a house style from the planning and research, I decided to use the three colours of: green, black and white throughout my media products which I created. I chose these colours due to me mainly seeing the colours black and white used on a number of magazine covers such as XXL and Vibe. These two colours, black and white, contrast each other as they are complete opposites, I also decided to choose these two colours as this shows the contrast in types of Hip-Hop music as there is many ways in which artists present their music. First of all white is a colour which is considered to be the colour of perfection. Some people will say that Hip-Hop if the perfect music genre, hence the reason I used white (the colour of perfection). Although black is the complete opposite to white in general music terms, black connotes the power of the genre as Hip-Hop has a huge population of listeners. Black also denotes a prestigious colour, for example a black tie event, black Mercedes.  I added green to these colours because the dark green, which I used, represents money and wealth. I did this as many Hip-Hop artists express their love for money and their affluent lifestyle.

Also on the front cover I used the image of the artist which the main story is about, this gives the reader the impression that this specific artist is the main feature in this edition of the magazine. I also represented this by placing the artists name in the centre of the magazine to show who the story is about.