In what ways does your product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For my music magazine "SWAG" I used a large amount of conventions of a real magazine called "XXL" because i wanted to make my magazine as realistic as I could. I added a barcode to the bottom left hand corner, I did this by cropping to original XXL barcode and then saving it as a jpeg, I then made a box in Indesign using the rectangle frame tool and placed the barcode within it, I did this to make my magazine look even more realistic. I got all my ideas from the magazine "XXL" to get the professional look, XXL magazine also helped me to convey the conventions of the hip-hop genre, which was the genre I choose for my music magazine.

The image below shows my image that I choose to use for my Front Cover,

As I said earlier, I do not think I challenged any forms and conventions, my Front Cover image is quite similar to the XXL one, I drew on the Superman tattoo on Anthony to give it that extra link between images, I also brought a long some necklaces which could be used as "bling" showing another link between both images. As you can see the model on the left is wearing a cap which is a popular style that a lot of hip-hop artists use. The light in the top right corner I managed to remove in Photoshop by using a stamp tool.

The reason I choose to copy this XXL front cover is because it looks simple, tidy and modern. I kept my models in the left third of the magazine so that I could easily fit in my mast head SWAG and the headlines going down on the left hand side. The image below shows my link between my masthead SWAG and XXL.

As you can see I kept my Font very similar but gave it a unique twist, again I don't believe I challenged any forms and conventions concerning the masthead or any of my Front Cover Design, I basically kept my Front Cover simple like XXL but I added some little unique twists, such as different fonts and adding different props within my main Front Cover image.

This an image of my Front Cover Design,

For my Contents page I think I may have challenged the conventions of a hip-hop magazine because this genre of music is mainly seen as masculine and for my Contents page I used a female model taking on the role of a new hip-hop artist Nicki Minaj as you can see in the image below.