Codes and Conventions of the Rock genre.

Codes/ Conventions of a rock magaizine:
Through researching existing and successful magazine companies that sell rock music magazines, I was able to gain an understanding of what is typical of this genre.
The layout tends to use medium shots of the artists and uses the sans serif font. The photos of the artists sometimes have a dark effect applied to them also, adding to a black and white appearance of the page. These images are also fairly large, covering the majority of the page.
The mast head of magazines of this genre often reflect the style of this genre though a dark colour scheme being used. Simialrly, effects such as glass smashing are used to reflect the rough  nature of the genre, which is very rough and somewhat 'hardcore'.
For the most part, the target audience wont be overly enticed by special offers, but have more preferance to instresting stories and articles, or their favourite atrists. Due to this, the plugs I use will focus more on the stories of the magazine as opposed to promations or offers.
The colours of the magazines tend to be very consistent with few bright or vibrant colours used. Black and white are by far the more popular of the colours used.

After analysing these magazines and gaining an understanding of the codes and conventions I'll confidently be able to incorparate some aspects into my magazine.

Draft Layout

I considered the way in which large music magazines (such as Kerrang)  structured their issues, and the layout they use. By doing so I could use some of their ideas as inspiration for the layout of my magazine. Once I did so, I sketched out a very rough example layout of what my magazine could look like. This sketch was both of an example cover, and example article page. The sketches would act as a size comparison, primarily. After drawing the sketches, I then added annotations of different features that were present. These annotations explained what each feature was, details of the feature (ie colour) and how it was effective or why it was present.

 I continued by creating a draft layout on publisher, based on these sketches. This layout didn't consist of any images. Instead it had boxes where I was planning on placing images and text in the finished magazine. The boxes were coloured accordingly, and by creating this draft layout I was able to ensure that the images and text of the finished magazine didn't overlap, and the layout looks tidy and structured overall.The feautres presented in the draft were all (commonly) used in magazines of the same genre; rock.


 

I also considered inital ideas for what would be on a rock magazine, for both the double page spread and the front cover page.

Front Cover:
Main image- Single person; solo upcoming artist, image should take up most of the page
Mast head- Large, grunge effect
Colour scheme- Black and white, some gray (background), yellow?
Plugs- Up to 3 different stories
Secondary images? would be much smaller
Coverline- subtle

Contents Page:
Colour scheme- consistent with colours, black, white, gray, some yellow?
Small images- refrers to the stories of the different pages
Title head- Similar style, grunge effect

Double Page:
One main image- positioned in the middle?
Text- Article topic; writing a song? Two columns?
Border?
Quotations- Bold, larger than the rest of the text
Same font used, consistency

Comparison of Music Magaines

I also decided to analyse music magazines' covers, taking into account the differences between a music magazines cover layout and the layout of another type of magazine (eg film, fashion, ect). Although many of the features between the magazine genres are the same, I noticed some slight differences, as mentioned in the above analysis. In addition to this, I also analysed several different music genres to see how they differed; which they did quite largely.

School Magazine Analysis

I continued by analysing my magazine, and identified areas which were effective, as well as those which lacked effective features thus would require improvements.
 




Overall, I think the magaizne cover and contents page simply had too much white / empty space, lacking information and images. Although there were some good features such as the use of consistence throughout both pages, the magazine simple wouldn't appeal to readers. As such was a fairly poor magazine.
Upon creating my next magazine, I'll ensure I use more images, colours and a more unique layout to make the magazine look more interesting to readers. I will also use aspects of this magazine that were fairly effective (such as the consistence and last head layout) too.

My School Magazine Cover & Contents

I then proceeded to create my own magazine which would be used as a school newsletter. All images were taken by me, and I ensured all were relevant to the subject of the magazine; the school.

In addition to creating a magazine cover, I also created a contents page. Again, the images used were mine, and relevant.

School Magazine Planning

Before creating the school magazine, I first created some draft sketches to ensure I was confident with the layout.

Draft layout of the Front Cover

Draft Layout of the contents page:

Magazine Cover Analysis

Here I analysed an existing magazine cover to gain an understanding of what features are used with in effective cover. I could then transfer some of these features onto my work, ensuring my cover is effective as possible.

Concepts in Media

Target Audience:
A target audience is the group of people that the product is aimed towards. A target audience may be an idevidual or a general group such as age, sex or interests.

Genre:
A genre is the catagory which the proudcts falls under. Films, TV programs, prints and radio all come under certain catagories.

Conventions:
These are the expected features of a product, thus the genre of the products could affect the conventions. For example, in a horror film you would expect to see violence and props such as a knife. Likewise, in a rock magazine you may expect to see a guitar. Conventions apply to all products of the same genre.

Codes:
There are two types of codes; technical and symbolic. Both of which relate to the conventions of a product. These are items that suggest a specific theme, such as dark lighting in a horror film- an example of technical. Symbolic codes may include connotations to props for example.