Magazine Conventions
Next thing we learned in Media Studies was all the conventions of a magazine. An important feature that a magazine needs is to be appealing to the human eye; a magazine should be the creation of creativity that is well structured and targets the right audience. A magazine should include things like a masthead, date line, puff/plug, barcode, coverlines and more features that make a magazine more popular among the people. Along with those features magazines need an appealing image to better connect with the audience; magazine makers utilize celebrities to achieve the purpose; thus, making better sales.
For the genre of my magazine is chose environmental awareness, in 2025 there is a lot of pollution that is taking over oceans and harming forests. The title I chose for my magazine was Plastic Reign; This is because I feel that over the last decade plastic has been taking over the environment, harming millions of acres of land and water.
My magazine has a picture of a plastic bag of chips on the grass which will break down into harmful microplastics; thus, polluting the environment.
I used coverlines to show what things are being done or what is happening today around the research on plastic, along with using coverlines I used puffs/plugs to capture the audience's attention on something that is especially important on the magazine cover. Date shows how updated the cover is, and it can give more credibility to the reader. Also, I use an intriguing headline to capture the audience and make their curiosity keep reading the magazine.
Final product
While creating my magazine cover I faced some challenges that frustrated me because I took longer on creating it than I expected, per example I had to learn how to use a new software ,which was adobe InDesign, and at first it's very intimidating not knowing how to start or what to do.
However, after watching the tutorials and getting comfortable with the software, I did solidly. On the other hand, one success I believe I had was getting a genre and making it look appealing for a target audience. I achieved this by picking appealing colors for the plug/puff and banner.
Something important that I take away from this assignment is that everything has features that make media more appealing to someone, even something as simple as a magazine. Learning the conventions of a magazine helps my portfolio project by not only teaching me more about all types of media, but also it could be a second option for my final project if the short clip does not work out.
