Conventions of magazines are somewhat gradual as they get more and more refined through layers being targeted towards certain groups. For example, conventions from magazine to magazine will be the same (to have a masthead, etc) but conventions of music magazines will be more specific, and conventions of a rock magazine would be even more niche.

House Style

Having a house style is one of the most important parts of designing a successful magazine. Having everything in the same order for every issue is an example of a house style, as it is custom to the magazine and will always be continuous through every issue. Other features of having a house style are logos, positioning, masthead style, some colour themes, and image styling. In order for a house style to be successful it must be appealing to the target audience, and show that through altering certain things within the style of that magazine to make them pleasing to the audience that the magazine is trying to attract or maintain. For example, Kerrang! uses its house style effectively throughout its issues. When looking at lots of Kerrang! issues together, you notice that similar colours are always used. Black, white and red always feature on the cover of this magazine, and these colours connote darkness and particularly rebelliousness and danger, which are traits the publisher wants the reader to be interested in or to ‘aspire’ to. Also the masthead shows a fair amount of continuity throughout issues as even though it might change colour it remains the same size and in the same position. This aspect of having a house style is primarily so readers know what they are looking for on the newsstand, and are able to identify with a magazine cover.

My image for my front cover was shot with natural light in order to maintain a realistic, down to earth feel, as through research I found that even though my audience cared about presentation, they preferred looks that were more naturalistic and less over exposed and fake. For this reason I decided to keep editing of the picture minimal and only added a clean coloured filter, upped the saturation whilst lowering the temperature. This along with the monochrome colour scheme of the fonts (bar one, which was a dusky, pastel pink, which was used as a bridge between the image and the headlines on the image as it accompanied the colour of the flowers on the models shirt) should be an effective house style for my magazine as it looks sophisticated and put together properly as it uses only 3 fonts, and also makes it look minimalistic (something my survey results said was preferred)so should attract people who care about clean, sophisticated, yet intricate design. When my magazine cover is placed next to Kerrang! you can see how different they really are. It shows how much of a big part the magazine cover plays in attracting different people, as my magazine cover doesn’t have the same conventions as Kerrang!, meaning readers of Kerrang! would be unlikely to pick up a copy, and vice-versa. When creating my magazine it made me realise how much of a big part researching your target audience is. If I hadn’t done a survey, I might not have known that people who were interested in a classical x pop genre wouldn’t mind not having a musical instrument on the front cover, or that they preferred things to look stylish yet classic. Without this information I might have made the magazine too obviously this genre by putting obvious references to classical instruments and using bright colours, when the people I’m aiming the magazine at actually prefer something more refined and clean.   

Overall, I haven’t broken boundaries with my magazine design, and have kept to the 4 F’s of magazine design. I felt that deviating from a theory that has been in practise for so long with so much success would be risky and could jeopardise the outcome of my magazine. Not following this widely respected theory requires a lot of bravery! It leads to an unusual looking magazine that can have negative reviews. Even though David Carson pushed the boat out during his time as art designer at RayGun and made wonderful magazine covers that didn’t always stay loyal to the 4 F’s, he did make covers that weren’t universally appreciated and weren’t completely practical or logical. I decided not only to play it safe and follow the theory because the structure would suit my target audience better, but also because modern publishers are reluctant to make magazine covers that are too out of the ordinary, and are very unlikely to invest in a magazine that has no structure of loyalty to theories of magazine design.

To conclude, I think that the way I have constructed my magazine uses conventions in a traditional, safe way. The desire of my target audience to have a style that is a hybrid of safe traditional and modern minimalistic is new and could be perceived as a way to develop genre and the conventions of other genres that use devices I have used. I think that development of conventions is healthy, as magazine design is a visual art, and art and design is always modernising and moving forward with fashion as it evolves to show new trends and styles. Merging styles together simply means that not only is it moving forward with pop culture, but staying true to its roots by following theories and using things that show a traditional side to the magazine, making it trust worthy. Most importantly, this is what my target audience are interested in, and it is suited to them, with is a starting point for sales of the magazine and making money through advertising which is ultimately the aim of a successful magazine.