Evaluation Question 1: In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

As a group, we chose Dubstep as a genre to focus on for our magazine. When researching for excistng Dubstep magazines, we found no magazines which focussed on Dubstep primarilly which is understandable as Dupstep still remains as an "underground" based culture and it is only in the last two years has begun to emerge into the mainstream market so for the time being, Dubstep remains in the niche market.

As my magazine would be the first to primarilly focus on Dubstep, it would naturally have its own conventions to suit the style of music. An example of this would be a magazine dedicated to grime using a graffitti font to link back the genre's urban roots.

So for my magazine to do this, I had to pick out a typical element of dupstep which I could link back to with my magazine so chose to focus on the most noticable element which is the boldness and loudness of the genre as it is a style of music which is mainly enjoyed being played at a high volume.

From looking at the front cover, the audience can immediatley see the striking colour scheme consisting of bold shades of blue, red and black. On a display in shops, I believe that the front cover would stand out to the audience due to this unusual yet "loud" colour scheme. So, for the case of the front cover, I belive that this particular piece uses its own conventions in a way to convey the genre it focuses on through its apperance.

However the layout is more of a typical convention as, like most existing magazines, the main articles are featured on the front cover:

As for my contents page, I believe that unlike my front cover, it has a more conventional feel to it:

Starting off with the articles, you can see that they are in list form which is a very common convention within existing magazines:

As well as this, there are also photos with captions underneath which link to some of the main articles which is also a typical convention for magazine contents pages.

The the case of my double page spread, I beleive that it had elements of traditional conventions in trems of layout as well as once again developing its own connventions to relate back to the nature of Dubstep in terms of image editing.

For example, I find that the layout is conventional having text on one side and then an image/images on the other. This layout can be seen on existing double page spreads:

As can be seen between my double page spread and an existing one, this convention is quite common where one page is mainly images and the other is mainly text

However, as well as consisting of conventional aspects, there was also elements of new conventions. For exmple the image on the right side was a combination of two images (the photo of the artist and the speaker) thus creating an entirley new one. This was also a link back to the genre of Dubstep as Dubstep is a genre where two or more different tracks are combined to make a new one.