1. Evaluation
Katie Scruton

8. FeedbackUpon asking my peers for their opinion on my work, I found out that their
favourite piece of my work was my Collage Fanzine because the font was
easy to read and the theme was obvious for the audience. They also liked
how the article was actually set out because it was easy to read. When I
asked for possible improvements that I could make, they said that I could
maybe add a barcode and also add a quirky box around the text to add a
little more drama to the page. I agree that I could add something around the
text to add to the punk theme and to make it stand out more however, I
don’t think I should add a barcode because it’s a double page spread to
feature in a fanzine so it doesn’t really need a barcode. Also it would look
out of place. In future I will consider these improvements while working on a
project.
For this project we were given 6 weeks to look at the features of typical Broadsheet and Tabloid paper spreads,
learn how to use Adobe Indesign and then create a Broadsheet page layout, a Tabloid page layout and our own
Fanzine page layout, all based on the work we did earlier in the year about subcultures.
As this is my last project, I am pleased that I have worked well with my time and am now in fact ahead of
schedule. I have been very productive with my time, getting multiple Broadsheet, Tabloid and Fanzine pages
produced and editing them and generally improving them to a high quality. By doing this, I have also produced a
mass of JPEGs, all showing the steps of improvement I had done, implying how far I had come with my work.
Hopefully, by the time I complete this evaluation, I will have completed this entire project within the given time
scale, maybe even before the deadline set.
In previous projects, I had maybe not finished certain tasks or put them on my blog in time for the deadline causing
me to eat into my own time and get a temporary referral for the project until the missing work was handed in. I am
glad that for my last project I am ahead of schedule and am completely happy with the work I have produced.
Time Management

9. Work In Progress
Once I finished my first draft of either my Broadsheets, Tabloids or Fanzine, I would look over the page I had created
and assess what I could improve about it. I would then repeat the process, changing even the tiniest parts of the
page, to improve my work as much as I could.
I think by doing this, I have pushed myself to improve my work to higher qualities to potentially improve my grade
instead of putting a half hearted effort in and not being happy with the results. If this was the case it may have also
effected my overall grade. Also, by taking the time to think about how I could possibly improve my work I have worked
better than I would have done before.
Because I took the time to look over my work, I reviewed each copy of it and saved JPEGs of each one. By the time I
was fully happy with what I had produced, I could see a clear difference in the quality of my work, for each style and
layout that I did. The JPEGs also allowed me to keep a record of my work so that I could keep track of my
improvements, from what it was to what it is now.
To make my improvements, I played around with the fonts I used, the image choices I made, the sizes of certain
objects on the page and their positioning. I basically just got all the content I wanted on the page and then played
around with it until it looked good and fit with the typical Broadsheet or Tabloid style layout or just looked like it could
potentially be a real, professional piece of work that is going to be published, for example, my fanzine pages.
This really helped me because I have probably improved my grade, put all my effort in and produced something I
never thought I’d be capable of making.

10. Technical and Creative Abilities
During this project, I have learned how to use Adobe InDesign so that I was actually able to create all the pages
that I produced. I feel that in the 5 weeks that I have being using InDesign, my skills have increased rapidly and I
am now confident in using the software for future projects (if I go into a career field where I may need to).
The most technical piece of work that I did was the collage background that I did for my first fanzine layout. This is
because I had to draw all the rectangle boxes for the pictures to go into, resize all of the images on Adobe
Photoshop separately to fit each individual box and then place them into the InDesign document, positioning them
to overlap on one another. It was very time consuming but worth the effort overall.
I think the most professional and creative pieces of work that I did is definitely my fanzine pages because they
actually look like they are going to be published in a publication like Kerrang! Or Rocksound. I think the reason
why my fanzine looks more professional than the newspaper pages is because I have a lot of experiences with the
same sort of publications so I had a really good idea of what I wanted to produce, whereas with the newspaper
pages, I spent a lot of time comparing them to one another to get a good idea of what to do. However, my fanzine
pages are still the more professional pages that I produced.
Each style (Broadsheet, Tabloid, Fanzine) that I designed allowed me to be creative in different ways. Broadsheet
let me practice with grids, setting them at 4 columns and 4 rows to structure mainly my article and image but was
very plain and straight forward, I couldn’t really do anything fun with it. Tabloid was the same really, I used a 4
column and 4 row grid set up but used mainly images with very little writing. Getting onto the Fanzine pages, this
is when my creativity really started to flow and I ended up with two different results that I am really happy with. I
used the grids to split the landscape pages in two and then just placed everything where it suited. The images
(similar to Tabloid papers) took up most of/ all of the pages which added to the informal and fun effect. I really like
the scrap book effect of the collage fanzine page because it looks hand made and quirky.
I think all in all, this is my best project to date because I had put all the skills I have learned over the last 2 years to
use and I was also interested in the subject of what was going to be on my pages. All this combined made me
work a lot harder and it also made me want to get a good grade and present my chosen subculture in a nice, fun
way.
This project allowed me to be just as creative as I was with the two photography projects that I did and I am very
happy with all of the work produced for these projects.

11. Finished Products
I think that this project allowed me to create my best piece of work on this course because I could choose the area
that I was most interested in and look into it more instead of just been handed exact details of something and
creating something around that. I do believe that I have achieved what I set out to do. I have created multiple
different layouts for Broadsheets, Tabloids and Fanzines. I followed the typical looks for both Broadsheet and
Tabloid, using the grids on Indesign to guide me with the placement of text columns and images etc. However, with
the Fanzine layouts, I broke free of grids to create something more imaginative then a newspaper allows for.
Again, for my Broadsheet and Tabloid layouts I stuck to the traditional looks of the different types, researching into
them to get a good idea of what I needed to create and I believe my creations do fit the criteria of different
newspapers and they are suitable for their different audiences. For my Fanzine pages, there was no real
specifications on how it should look. Luckily, I have a lot of experience in my subcultures and their Fanzines as I
have a lot of examples of them. I went for a modern Fanzine to fit the article that I produced a while ago
(comparisons of punk now and then). I feel like both the pages I designed fit the audience well and are similar to
those found in pre-existing punk Fanzines, Kerrang! and Rocksound.
With the content, all of the writing (Masthead, headings and articles) were my own. It would have been pretty
much impossible for me to use my own images, especially on my newspaper designs because I would have
needed to be alive in the 70’s. Instead, I used pre-existing images found on Google. For my newspaper images I
just used images that related to the article (Sex Pistols getting arrested and the God Save The Queen artwork).
For one of my Fanzine pages, I just used a bunch of images of classic punk bands and newer punk bands. For my
other one, I chose an image of Johnny Rotten performing live in the 70’s and an image of Billie Joe Armstrong
performing live in 2010. They fit well together as they both face each other in the separate images and both
images have dark backgrounds making them fit together even more so. I did encounter some problems with the
images and resizing them in Photoshop because some of them would distort. To overcome this problem, I played
around with the box in Indesign, making the measurements both bigger and smaller and then adjusting the photo
to fit without distortion. The finish product allowed me to increase and gain skills in both Photoshop and Indesign,
using grids to help my layouts and boxes to insert resized images from Photoshop in. If I had these skills in
previous projects (like the recipe cards) I would have potentially created some better work.
I think that all of my newspaper pages could be improved some how. In my opinion, my Broadsheet doesn’t look
full enough because my article wasn’t really long enough as their wasn’t a lot of information on my chosen event.
With my Tabloid paper design I think to improve it, I should have moved everything out, filling the space in the
margin for less white space and to make it more Tabloid ish. I am completely satisfied with my fanzines, especially
my ‘Then Vs Now’ one because it looks the most professional.