Forms and conventions

When creating my magazine I wanted to try and appeal to both males and females but this developed into mainly a male orientated cover story and feature article as you can see from the image on the left. This is because I wanted to create a punk and hardcore music magazine and I felt that using black and white images expressed a moody and ominous atmosphere.

The title of my magazine is ‘Unsound’ as this relates to an underground band and the music they are creating, thus presenting the band on the cover of the magazine as a rather unknown band who has begun to gain

some attention within different media outlets. The title of my magazine also challenges the Culturally Dominant Ideology, this is can be seen as sound is mainstream and yet Unsound is clearly alternative and thus seems to attack the CDI. When photographing for the images I was to be using for my magazine I chose to shoot the images under Great Yarmouth pier and then either lowered the saturation and increased the contrast to create stark visuals. Props were unimportant, but I chose to dress the models of the photos in hoodies and jackets also wearing different types of dark clothing as it would fit well with the theme of the magazine.felt that using black and white images expressed a moody and ominous atmosphere.

For the fonts of my magazine I decided to use for my front cover and contents page to use a bold type of font so this would strike the viewer’s gaze. However I also used a font type that was quite grungy, bold and sharp in its look as this helped the image stand out, fit with the theme of a magazine and give off an overall aggressive effect, the font itself was called 'ambulance shotgun'. I also used this aggressive type font for the title of the band featured in the magazine (“Sirens”), the font type was called Dead Secretary. For the main bulk of text however I decided it would be best to use a simple Ariel text , but on important heading such as what was featured or a

question that was being asked to the band I would use a bold effect on this text so that the reader would recognize this as an important aspect of the magazine.

When writing the answers or describing what the heading involved then I used ‘Franklin Gothic Heavy’ as this stood out to the audience, yet not so much that it distracted the audience from the actual headings.. For the colours featured in my magazine I used a number of different colours for different headings including the title of the magazine, the issue number, sub headings on the content page and band names. The band names on the cover of my magazine as well as the headings of the contents page are primarily in yellow, this colour is eye catching and also connotes happiness and excitement. The blue text of Sirens commonly connotes a calm emotion and thus gives another perspective to the band. For my feature article I used a large amount of red colouring in the background, this generally connotes danger which emphasises Sirens as an aggressive band.

Overall I took a large amount of influence from Kerrang! magazine as this appealed to the same type of demographic audience that I also wanted my magazine to appeal to (males aged 15-25). I also studied the contents page of Rock Sound and Kerrang! and the layout of both their contents pages and featured articles and chose to take influence from these layouts. I featured bold headings and page numbers for each section of the magazine, much like Kerrang! and other music magazines do, and in turn appealing to the same type of audience as they do.