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

Conventions are ways that magazines are constructed to look and read in a certain way. For example cosmopolitan is a woman's magazine and has pictures of women on the front, it would go against conventions if it didn't have women on the front because its seen as a woman's magazine, you wouldn't expected to see men with tons of make-up on the front of cosmopolitan. So by breaking conventions you have to go against stereotypes and argue that they cease to exist in your magazine. A magazine that has stereotypical conventions is Kerrang! most people think that people who read Kerrang! are Emo's and Goth's this isn't necessarily true at all, i read Kerrang! and i wouldn't consider myself an Emo or a Goth.

Conventions also has to do with the ways in which a magazine is set out and how they choose they fonts and pictures for each weeks issue. I followed most layout techniques that most magazines used, for example i had a masthead and a main image. These were all essentials for my magazine.

I produced a Rock & Soul magazine which had Rock bands featured within it and also it had soloist singers that were classified as being part of the Soul genre. I felt that i followed conventions to a degree because i didn't feel that i disagreed with many conventions of magazines that were similar to mine. I did however go against conventions with my split genre choice, Soul and Rock music aren't often put together so i suppose i was disagree with stereotypes which have been in forced and i bridged the boundaries between the two genre's.  Another convention which i feel i have drifted away from is the multiple images that are normally montaged together on most magazines. I decided that in my magazine i didn't want there to be any subordinate images on the front page, because i didn't want to distract attention from the main image, so i only had one image on my front page. This goes against conventions because nearly all magazines have multiple images on the front.