Georgiana Angus

Conventions are described as a way in which something is usually done. So it's basically the most common thing to do. Conventions appear everywhere in society as It's a habit of ours to follow the Status Quo. It appears in just about anything, social habits, political opinions and media production alike. It's what's popular.

In our case with media production, what is popular is what sells, so following conventions may not do much for you on the artistic front, but will probably guaranty sales.

So lets talk about conventions of magazines and how they compare to my magazine.

As I'm creating an indie music magazine I will be comparing it to real indie magazines on the market and to their conventions.

The Cover

 My cover follow a lot of the conventions of an indie magazine cover. With its single word name, and it's minimalist design it would be hard to call it anything other than an indie magazine, but there are a few differences that I feel also adds to the product. However lets talk about similarities first.
My magazine follows the conventions of having a solid background that two of the four examples follow. This is a convention of indie magazines as nearly all the covers will have a solid coloured back and the main image will over lay the colour. In addition I followed the convention of having the cover lines towards the bottom of the page and not fill up the page to much with loud and extra imagery.

A lot of what I did that followed conventions also followed my questionnaire that I sent out to people within my target audience which can be found here. Pretty much every part of the questionnaire was followed and these all fit with the conventions of the magazine. However a few parts of the questionnaire that I followed did not fit in with the convention of Indie magazines.

I asked the question if they wanted to see the musician on the cover or the album art. The vote was a steep lean to the album art. I followed this and used art work on the cover instead of just a solid image of the band. This goes against indie magazines as they always have the artist on the cover, mostly shot with a close up or mid shot.

My magazine generally uses the same font face as the indie magazines which is sans serif. This goes against my questionnaire where most people voted on a hand written font or a serif font.

The Contents 

 My contents does not follow the style of the contents of indie magazines but more of magazines like Q. This is something that looking back on a regret, however I still like the way the cover came out.
My contents follows conventions of having key articles and main images from these article to entice the reader, just like Q does. I also used a bar on the top to highlight the magazine title and the page title like Q did as well. In addition I used Q's idea of numbering the images and putting lines between the different key articles. My contents page doesn't really go against conventions and this is both a good thing and bad thing. I feel like I should have tried more to make the contents page my own and not just reused an established style, but it does mean it's easier to navigate and understand for the audience.