This document discusses how a magazine product uses conventions of popular magazines to target young girls as its audience. It uses many images and bright colors like pink, blue, yellow, and green on its pages. While pink is a typical color, the magazine includes a variety of bright colors to seem less feminine and avoid stereotypes. The magazine also uses informal language, slang, abbreviations and colloquialisms commonly found in popular magazines to make readers feel comfortable. Important conventions like puffs, plugs and buzzwords that engage readers are also used on cover lines and stories.
1. Q1) In what ways does your
media product use, develop or
challenge media products?
2. My magazine uses conventions of real pop magazines, like lots of
images on the pages within the magazine. This convention is present
throughout pop magazines, like mine, the target audience tends to be
young girls so images are a good way of catching the eye of a person
of this age.
3. Bright colours are a convention present in pop magazines and this is a
reason, which I have used them in my work. I have used multiple bright
colours, like blue, yellow, pink, orange, and green to appeal to my target
audience as they engage them. When I originally created my magazine I
created it using lots of pink, this is very typical of the genre but after getting
some audience feedback I decided to add a variety of bright colours as it
give the magazine a older feel and gives it a more exciting look. This
additionally breaks the convention, making the magazine less feminine, and
therefore not encouraging girls to conform to the stereotypes associated
with the colour.
4. Additionally a convention of pop magazines in the
specific type of language. The magazines use very
informal language, in order for the reader to feel
comfortable. This is because teenagers use lots of
colloquial language, slang, and abbreviations in
everyday life. I noticed whilst researching pop
magazines they incorporate a lot of slang and
abbreviations to appeal to their target market and
continue to use the conventions of a pop magazine.
5. For example, on my front cover I wrote 1D instead of One
Direction as this is what the band name is commonly referred to
as. On my contents page I use the greeting ‘hiya’, which is very
informal. I additionally use hash tag trending, and OMG. On my
double page spread I presented the text in an interview style,
commonly used in pop magazine. I additionally created a section
on my artists favourite songs of 2015, as this is the type of
information my audience is interested in.
6. I noticed lots of boxes and outlines are used
within pop magazines to highlight cover lines or
stories on the contents page. I used this
convention throughout my magazines as it
helped to organise the pages and make it
appear less cluttered.
7. One of the most important conventions was the use of puffs, plugs and buzz
words. These types of words used, make the reader feel like you’re offering
them something and hep to engage them when they see the magazine. I
made sure that, like in a pop magazine all of the cover line and stories on the
contents page were worded in this way. I used words like ‘exclusive’ and
‘revealed’ to tell the reader that you aren’t going to got this information
anywhere else and that they must buy this magazine otherwise they’ll never
know this ‘exclusive’ gossip. The word ‘free’ additionally engages the potential
buyer as they feel as if they’re getting something for nothing, this is a
convention used a lot in pop magazines.