In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Conventions are a custom, or tradition. They are a standard of presentation of which have been followed particularly in the magazine industry since it first began. Some magazines are more conventional than others, depending on the subject matter and audience.
The genre of my music magazine is 'Two tone' and 'SKA' music, a genre of which i thoroughly enjoy listening to, and the culture and style surrounding inspires me. I believe there is still a reasonably large fanbase for it. Also, I had the knowledge that no magazine focusing on this somewhat niche genre was presently in the market, therefore, no competition.
I was heavily influenced by NME magazine during the designing process, noticing that over the years, every single issue follows set conventions, and never make drastic changes. The commercial, bold approach to the design is very appealing to me, and combines perfectly with my chosen music genre. The predominant main colours for NME are red and black- with small amounts of yellow to grab the readers attention. I took this into account, therefore used one small dose of yellow on my magazine front cover, to promote a Fred Perry competition.
I decided not to add a large amount of colour on my magazine, as the whole contextual message sent with two tone music is that 'all you need is black and white', communicated through greyscale photos, and choice of clothing. Therefore, taking into account my target audiences interests- such as patriotism for Britain, I chose to use just blue and red throughout the whole magazine, with one exception. I used the same shades of each, so there wasn't a large variety of different shades scattered around the page. As yellow and red are the two most used colours in the magazine industry, I followed the conventions, and also used these two to highlight key features on the page.
As hundreds of other magazines, NME follow the basic convention of placing the magazine title in the top left of the page; as did Rudeboy. Also, my research exposed the fact that many magazines, for some reason, rotate the barcode 90 degrees in the bottom right of the page, to add more content space. Rudeboy followed this convention.
Many magazines create competitions, print free posters, and allow oppurtunities to win gifts, NME is a perfect example. I decided to increase customer loyalty, and offer a wide variety of these, to make readers continue buying Rudeboy after the first issue. Rudeboy offers free posters, a competition to win a fred perry limited edition t-shirt, and vouchers to collect a harmonica. I particularly think that the harmonica promotion will work the best, as 5 tokens need to be collected- printed in the forthcoming 4 issues. This increases customer loyalty.
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