traditional or nontraditional?

am debating whether the mockup i am making should follow traditional magazine format or not, was looking @ two magazines, one was TIME, the other one was called TRIBUTE, something about movie stars, i just picked them out from the magazine rack @ the fitness center, what was so very weird was how very similarly they were constructed, title page, then filler, then contents, then letters to the editor, then main content, then one more op-ed kind of piece, then the end, one had the exact date (TIME) the other one said september 08, so one can easily understand if it is a weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly magazine), i am not quite sure how to number it, VOLUME 1, no. 1, volume 1, issue 1, should it be rectangle or triangular, but basically i think it should be conforming to pretty conventional forms, then again it could be different each month like emigre used to be, or it could have different forms in the same issue, there sre lots of possibilities but at this time i just go ahead and make another mockup ( i have one already)- by the way both magazines had three staples at the spine