Putting the typical conventions of a magazine onto my own =)

After finishing the key points to start making a music magazine, (Genre, colour scheme and title) I could start focusing on being precise with my magazine by putting typical conventions on my front cover. The typical conventions of any magazine tend to be one main picture with a catchy brief next to the picture to attract the audience, side stories, bar codes, price, issue number, free give aways and other featured bands. All of these combined will create a brilliant, eye-catching music magazine. The first convention I added was the price and issue number:

I used the same font for the price and issue number as I wanted to set a common theme to follow as all successful magazines, such as 'NME' use the same style font throughout their magazine.  Still referring to real magazines, i needed to add a bar code to my magazine to give the sense of realism to it: 

As mentioned before, the bar code does give a realistic effect to it. I also added the "Featured bands" section to my magazine. I have used indie/rock bands and bands that I like too. The key bit about this section is that it can denote that it is an indie/rock magazine. I filled the 'Flipside' in with white. This made it more eye catching in my opinion. All that was left to add was the main story and the side story, then my first draft of my front cover was finished, ready for constructive criticism:

My finished first draft. as you can see, I have added the main story, side story and the free give away. I have stuck with the white and orange colours for the text to give a theme to the magazine. I also added the orange to the issue and price as I linked it with the name 'Flipside'. I thought that it would be pretty clever to use the different colours (Orange and white) as the borders for the two different things, as if it was flipped around to be different colours. I've placed the text in her eye vision to make it look like she is looking up to it, as well as the title. I have done this to make it look like she is interacting with the magazine, to denote that she has a story to tell. The side story denotes that there are more stories to tell so it would jump out to a wider audience. The free posters will spur the audience to buy it because it increases the buyers if there is free items to give away.