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

For the print pieces, there were conventions that would need to be followed to make it resemble a real media product, such as the track listing on the back of the CD cover and the album title and band name on the front of the CD cover.

We looked at professional examples of CD cases in order to note the conventions that were essential, concluding that from the visual approach things such as the artwork reflecting the main themes of the album or artist, and maintaining a consistent design aesthetic were very important. Also, in order to present our CD case as a professional example, we recognised that we needed to include the likes of a barcode, the copyrights and recordings text usually seen on the back cover of CD cases and the band’s websites.

On the advert we also followed some conventions of music magazine adverts that we had researched - for example we included an image of the album cover, and also displayed the release date of the album and where it would be available to buy clear to the reader. Other conventions that were important to follow to emphasise that it was designed for a music magazine was we included the name of the magazine, the issue date and a page number in the bottom corner of the page. We felt that these small conventions were important to give our advert authenticity so that it resembles a real media product that could be seen in a magazine. We deliberately positioned our background image slightly left of centre frame, thus it remained the main focus of the advert yet provided us with a large space that needed filling. So we researched some more magazine adverts for other albums, and found that many included reviews of the album by other music magazines. We decided that this was an important convention to follow and added in two reviews.

With regards to the main image, we have followed and challenged some conventions. When taking the picture we have used the classic foreground (table and paints), middle ground (canvas) and background (landscape slightly out of focus) layout. The main focus of the image is the canvas and we have challenged conventions by putting the main focus point off-centre which gives our piece an individual touch. We have also challenged conventions by not including any images of the band members across the whole of the print section; again this gives our piece a unique touch. Another convention that we challenged is that in the inside panels of the CD we have only included a few lyrics, usually a couple of lines, from the tracks featured on the album. On real media products we saw that lyrics for the whole of the songs were included.