After looking extensively at the variation in genre conventions of mainstream pop magazines such as RollingStone, Billboard and Q Magazine I picked several elements to expand on for inspiration for the overall look of my magazine. Firstly, I used a serif font for my coverlines to conform to the conventions of typography during the time period my magazine takes inspiration from which is the 1950s. However this challenges modern mainstream pop magazines such as Billboard who typically uses serif fonts consistently to appeal to their mass audience; but will create a unique look against the popular magazine market. The masthead on my cover also challenges typical real media conventions as I use two separate font styles to create a vivid logo as well as using a low filled orange photo screen overlay on the text to create a soft tone to both colours and give it a retro look. In my draft, I did not adhere to the conventional banner that many magazines I had researched adopted to either sell the particular issue or draw in on exclusive as I felt it would take up too much space and wanted my cover to be simplistic in terms of coverlines and a spacious image.
This will stand out against standard magazine logos that use only one colour for the masthead. For my contents page I tried to imitate the layout of Billboard magazine by using some negative space between the image and text to give a clean and precise finish to the edge of the image. By also using one image that has been cropped using the polygon tool I challenge typical magazine conventions as the contents is not overcrowded with framed photos and bold text; allowing the house style to be simple and stylish to appeal to my female audience. I developed my contents title further by adopting a heart shape and implementing a light to dark gradient overlay on the hot pink colour to give a 3D effect.
I decided not to visually implement a clear divide in the double page spread, such as a photo or shape division, as I felt that this restricts to spacing of the article text and the amount of images allowed on a page. Therefore, I resized several images using the grid across the top third of the page to balance to page and allow more images to convey the context of my article further. Although I did use several shape divisions in the form of three lines which would then tie in with my American theme of the page to give a clean cut it did not look unprofessional. I found on conventional magazine double page spreads that a realistic image of a persons in a natural scene or a or posing in a full studio shot that would span across the page. I did not think that staging a realistic scene for my artist was appropriate and did not fit into the fun theme; I felt it was also better to manipulate the image to give a professional look. It was important that I investigated the conventions of other magazines types of the same genre so I could be able to imitate similar layouts but adapt it so that it had a unique selling point in comparison to other generic magazines, such as Billboard.
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