We were given the brief to design a local newspaper for a local area of our choice, I decided to produce a local newspaper for the Dengie Peninsula. There is already a tabloid styled local newspaper so I decided to make a broadsheet local newspaper to fill the gap in the market.
My newspaper follows the conventions of the Maldon and Burnham Standard, The Times and The Echo in style especially with the websites. My audience is both male and female middle to upper class citizens of the Dengie who would be interested in the news in their local area.
My front cover was based on the layout of a metro newspaper. I believe that this local newspaper's layout is clear, concise and aesthetically pleasing with a balance of images and text. However, my local newspaper features one large image to draw the reader in. In this sense my local newspaper has more text than other local newspapers on the front page so I am breaking the convention. I included one image and one advert to make the newspaper appear as a broadsheet. If I had made my front page again I would have made the headline for my main article differently as at the moment it does not look particulary good on the background of the main image of the harbour.
I made the advert in an art programme called sai which is a Japanese programme that has many preset shapes, I made it with a graphics tablet. I believe the colour and design suits the newspaper and the venue very well.
My articles are entirely focused on the local area and what matters to the people in them, my target audience. One of the articles on the front cover continues into the newspaper, this would encourage the customer to buy my newspaper over a competitor to find out what happens. All of my articles use size 8 Times New Roman font for the main body text of the newspaper because this is the font used by broadsheet newspapers such as, The Times. This font looks professional being a serif font means that is appeals more to an intelluctual audience than a sans serif font such as, Arial.
My second page of my local newspaper follows the same conventions and style as my front page. I used again mostly text with only a few images following the convention of a broadsheet newspaper rather than a tabloid local newspaper. I added a coupon for a local small zoo in the dengie which is a way of recording customer loyalty. I used cutting lines to show that the coupon is meant to be cut out. I am pleased with my second page as it features many articles with few images like the newspapers that I based it off, I believe that it looks professional and the content will clearly appeal to its target audience. If I had done the page again I would have rearranged the columns so that the coupon could be at the bottom of the page.
My idea for a poster came from seeing similiar style iPad posters on the side of vending machines in many train stations, as well as on the side of phone boxes and bus shelters. My poster is a photo of my iPad Photoshopped so that the screen would display an article of my newspaper. This advert would be successful as it would make the newspaper appealing to people who want to read the news on a device such as an iPad or the AmazonKindle. The slogan "Local News That Matters To You" would draw the reader in because of the person pronoun "you".
My website followed the conventions of the echo and maldon and burnhams newspaper websites they both had the same layout and on further research it appeared that most local websites follow the same layout. Using this I used similar content areas for my website, with an area for news and education on the front page. Being a local newspaper I noticed that there was always a section for local jobs on the website so I added this and a weather report which is equally important to a local newspaper website. These can be viewed on any page of the website.
My articles include the top story from the newspaper and featured similar narratives to the articles in my newspaper. I used matching colours in my link bar in a similar way to The Times does which featured roll overs changing the colour of the link to show what you had highlighted. This was made using a simple colour changed image rolling over the previous one. I made my website in dreamweaver which enabled easy linking and alignment of images. I sliced my pages into 3 sections which made it easier to edit the link bar. I am pleased with the finished product and I have developed my skills with dreamweaver a programme I have never used before.
If I were to do the project again I would have spent more time on the website to produce a more aesthetically pleasing finished product that better represented the community. I used Photoshop to create my masthead, my website pages and my poster. The layer tool is very useful being able to section out areas making them easily able to be edited with stroke and other image effects. InDesign was used to make the newspaper which is useful for easy column linking which was important for my newspaper as it featured mainly text, the layout suited my genre of newspaper. Both these programmes made me able to represent the community positively. I believe I have given the local community a newspaper that represents their needs.
Monday 2 May 2011
Website Research
In my research for my website I discovered that must local newspaper sites like to section off their news into sections such as Weather, News, Top Story, sport and education. In keeping with this I too have decided to use this and have sectioned my website accordingly.
The Times uses colour coding to make the different content sections easier to read and navigate, I have used this convention on my website for the same effect.
The Times uses colour coding to make the different content sections easier to read and navigate, I have used this convention on my website for the same effect.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)