In what ways does your magazine use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real magazines you have read/analysed?
For my AS music magazine, I looked at various types of music magazines (BBC Music, Rap-Up, Kerrang, The Source, NME, Billboard, Smash Hits, King, XXL, The Big Cheese, Smooth, etc…). All of these magazine scans gave me inspiration/knowledge as they showed magazine conventions, ideas, etc…one of which for example was to have the artist or band (I wasn’t sure at the time when first looking at/researching other magazines) as a big image, covering a lot of the magazine as it the image is usually the biggest attraction on music magazine covers opposed to text. So I featured a large image of my fictional rap group HaterProof for my magazine cover. (below are some of the magazine front covers I looked at)
For research I also looked at magazine publisher websites: Kerrang (http://www.kerrang.com/), The Source (http://www.thesource.com/), The Big Cheese (http://www.bigcheesemagazine.com/), XXL (http://www.xxlmag.com/), Billboard (http://www.billboard.com/#/footer/biz), etc…
And as well as looking at and annotating front covers of many magazines and looking at magazine websites, I also found, looked at and annotated contents pages, interviews and other inside features. From looking at the magazines and annotating them, I learnt many conventions that I did not know before. These included knowing that usually the 1st letter on an interview is larger than other text, the magazine’s website is featured in the magazine, pull quotes are featured with interviews, etc…Knowing the page number, magazine name, issue information and magazine website were all featured in interview pages and the reason that there are gaps in contents page numbers is because there are lots of adverts inside magazines. (below is an example of my annotation of a Lil’ Kim interview front cover of magazine The Source)
Also I learnt things/was inspired by inside magazine features that I found, mainly on the inside interview features of female rappers Trina & Jacki-O. Although I did not use their ideas completely because I wanted as much text as possible in my magazine article so that the interview would look/seem real and of good quality. The Trina & Jacki-O articles featured an additional picture (as well as their front cover feature) of them with a pull quote (large quote of what was said in the interview) and although I had seen pull quotes and learnt about them through other features, through seeing these i was inspired to put pull quotes with a new picture as I thought it looked good. (below are examples of Trina & Jacki-O magazine features which gave me this inspiration)
So from studying these real music magazine covers I learnt conventions that were featured in them and used the following from them in my magazine: A title, sub-title, magazine website, barcode, issue number, date of magazine, a price, a free gift, pictures, pull quotes, page numbers, interviews, album reviews, best albums of the year, celebrity news and information on features inside the magazine. Although free gifts are not a very common feature in music magazines, I thought it would be an important selling point to include one. For example, if someone was not sure which magazine to purchase, they would pick the one with the free gift over the one without one (seems better value). Plus the fact that there aren’t many music magazines offering a free CD, it fills a gap in the market which is a good thing as it is a Unique Selling Point.
I decided to choose the genre of rap/hip-hop because I like many artists of the genre and have knowledge about it, which I used in my magazine, especially the interview as I used stereotypical american rapper language. Here are some of the artists I like which inspired me to choose the genre:
