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

On my front cover I feel that followed conventions of professional media products relatively closely, while adapting it to my own style aimed at my target audience of girls aged 14 - 18. Usually on a magazine the masthead would be across the top, and I have replicated this convention on my cover. However, I felt that the masthead text being the same scale the whole way through was very common among professional products, so I decided to skew the text of my masthead, which may be a factor contributing to how unique my media product is. In my photo on my front page I followed conventions by doing a close up of the model so that the audience can see evidently what is included in the magazine.

On my contents page, I chose a simple layout which follows the conventions that are set by popular magazines such as Q, although other popular magazines like Kerrang! have a different layout in which everything largely stands out, and I chose to opt for a more organised layout as I feel this would better suit my target audience. However, my contents page also challenges conventions set by professional products in that rather than consisting of just one image, as contents pages often do, it has two images. Initially, I started of with  the second image on the contents page being the only one on there as I felt it was a strong image, but I felt that the image above it added to the overall appeal of the page and gave it a better look.

I also feel that my double page spread is laid out in accordance to conventions set to popular music magazines such as Q. The text is laid out in three columns, with gutters to separate them, and forms itself around two pull quotes. The spread also consists of a full-body image of the model, which is edited in a unique way and relates well to the article's content, a large title which spans across two thirds of the spread, and a box containing additional information to go with the article. I felt that boxing the additional information and the article photo would make it easier for the readers to keep their minds away from them until they had read the text, while still recognising their significance to the article. I also feel that making the article title span two thirds of the spread made it large enough to capture the attention of the reader but not so large that it didn't look right.