2. Time management
For my broadsheet, I managed my time very well. I only used one day to make my broadsheet and the next day to change it around
and add advertisements so I had more than one for my final work. On the third day, I added in the small details to make it look more
like a broadsheet with specific things such as price and the time and date. For my tabloid newspaper article, I did the same things in
the same amount of days but spent a bit more time designing it. However with my fanzine article, I spent 2 days making it and one
day changing it to get different versions and see what worked best for it. My timeframe was that the three days of each week I
would get the product finished and completed, which I did. As I managed to complete all of these products within the three weeks, I
managed to work in the timeframe that was set and handed my work in on time.
On the first day of each week we also made plans and decided on fonts and images. This was helpful as it made it easier and a lot
quicker when it came to making the templates as I had something to go by, then when I had decided I was happy and had to put the
copy in, the fonts I was going to use was already decided. The images made it easy too, rather than having to find them online again,
they were already saved.
One thing that I could have done better with the time management was the fanzine article. I feel that because of time it wasn’t done
to its best and that I could have made it better with more time.
Other projects that I have handed in at the start of college weren’t handed in on time. My time management wasn’t good but has
greatly improved recently by getting my last few projects in on time. My graphic narrative project was handed in a day late and was
incomplete, I still had a little bit to do on the last page. By not handing in my projects in on time, my work wasn’t done to its best
ability a I didn’t spend as much time on it as I could have done and I got a lower grade, however recently when I have handed my
work in on time and have had chance to go back and change what as wrong with it, I have come out with a much higher grade.
Reviewing work in process
To review my work as I was going along, I kept taking screenshots and saving different
things. By doing this I was able to see where it was going and what I needed to do next. I
think I reviewed my work well as put things in different places to see what looked best
and saved them. An example of this is on my tabloid, I couldn’t decide which side the
smaller story should be at so I saved it at both sides and decided upon the left side. I
also asked my peers and tutor for feedback to see what looked best.
I also had up an image of an existing product at the side of the screen that I modeled my
products on. By doing this I was able to see if I was missing anything as I could make it
look like existing products a lot more easier.
3. In this project, I have used a new programme called In Design. I used in design to make my broad sheet and tabloid newspapers
articles. I did this because I was able to set up grids and margins to make them more accurate and look more professional. A new tool
that I used was the image box on in design, to prevent the image from distorting I could see the measurements and put them in on
Photoshop to make them fit back on in design. Considering I have never used in design before, I think my work looks very professional
and much like what they are supposed to be. On both articles, I was able to transfer the rest of the copy that didn’t fir into one
column into the next with no trouble, which I think is a good tool as it can take some time getting it right without that tool. By using in
design I could set up grids, this meant that my text and images would all be lined up in place without being even slightly out of place. I
could set up the margins to the correct columns and rows which fitted best according to my flat plans.
To make my broadsheet look more professional, I included a pull quote in it. I thought that it looked better and more appealing with it
in. I got the idea from when I researched the broadsheets and noticed that The Guardian use a similar one. I made it on in design and
it was difficult to make it fir in with the text outside of it as I had to make room with it which meant I had to change font size and keep
adjusting it to fit.
From a technical standpoint I think I have done well using the in design programme to make my articles. I think the overall look of my
articles, especially my broadsheet, look professional. I used images from 1969 as that’s when Woodstock Festival was. It was hard to
find good quality images but I managed to do so in the end. I like the images because you can tell that
they were taken in the 60’s yet they still look good enough quality for a newspaper. I think that my work does
look professional but it could be improved to make it look very professional. I made it look professional by
doing lots of research to see what techniques tabloids, broadsheets and fanzines use. For broadsheets I noticed
that they use old fashioned fonts for their headlines, such as , which is the most noticeable
and first thing you see when you look at a newspaper. I looked at things such as headline fonts, body copy fonts,
images, advertisements and prices. To make it look professional, I also included the fine details such as the date
and how much it would cost. For a tabloid, the price was often bigger as it was cheaper, such as 50p in a large
circle and broadsheets often had a small circle with £1 in it.
Technical competencies
In design also made it easy to make my work look professional by putting the text into perfect columns. The
width between them are all the same because of the grids that I put on. I knew that I needed four columns for
the article so I used the appropriate grids and the right margins to help the text fit it in and the measurements
look precise when looking at the article.
4. A specific area of my work that could be improved is the text on my tabloid newspaper. I think that it looks a bit out
of place but I researched other newspapers and they all have the small bit of text like that. I think it could have been
improved by using a different font and making the white box have a very small less opacity to make it not stand out
as much and look as square. I also could have made the text fir the box better, the box looks too big so it looks as
though there isn’t enough text to fill it.
Another improvement that could be made was the text at the very bottom of my broad sheet news paper. Due to my
pull quote which I made after I put in all of the text, the second column doesn’t meet with the other three at the
bottom, it is slightly risen. I could improve this by using one of the tools to gradually make it move down without it
being too noticeable. I could try and edit the font size but it makes the article too short.
I did my fanzine on Photoshop. The technical improvement I could make on my fanzine is the text on it. I feel that I could have put it in a
more interesting font with a different colour other than white. I could have also put a feather on the box around the text, I made it a black
one with a very small opacity so the background image was still visible through it. I think that the edges make it very square
This article on the right was the one I chose to try and make my
broadsheet look like. I liked the idea of the columns, picture and the
other stories down the right hand side. My article was longer and the
picture was smaller so I made a few alterations but made my flat plans
based upon this article from The Times. I like their mast head better and I
think that mine could have been more interesting however I prefer the
length of my article, I think the longer article and the smaller picture work
better and make it have more of a professional feel to it. I think that my
title going straight across makes mine look more like a broadsheet and
more professional rather than the title as the columns and I have a drop
capital as the first letter which makes it more effective. I also thin that my
pull quote is more effective than The Time’s pull quote.
5. In this project, my fanzine gave me the best chance to be creative. For my fanzine, I did a front cover and
an article. My favorite creative bit of my fanzine is the polaroid pictures. I got an image of a plain one
from Google and used Photoshop to add images into them and make them fit. I had to do four in total
and I think that they make my fanzine look complete as I tried to go for an old fashioned look as it was
mainly about hippies in the 1960’s. I think I managed to get an old fashioned feel with the wooden
background and the old fashioned images but I still wanted it to look modern so people would read it. I
think that with my fanzine front cover I was very creative and made it all myself, and tried to make it
look as though it would be found in an already published magazine. I used lots of colours to relate to
hippies and make it more colourful and creative. I think that the title of my fanzine makes it look very
creative, I got a pattern off Google and put it behind my chosen font of ‘flowers’ and used a clipping
mask to make it in the pattern the background.
I really like the flowers on the front cover of my fanzine. They were originally all
one picture but I split them up and resized them to how I wanted. I think that
they go well with the theme of hippies and fashion and they look bright. Without
the flowers the front cover looks a lot different, they bring a big effect on the
fanzine.
The background on my fanzine is just some wooden floorboards. I got the image
off Google and put two into each, the front cover and the article, and changed
the opacity down slightly to 90 so that they weren’t too solid and in the way, they
are a little bit faded so the images stand out more than the background.
The main image on the front cover was the most creative I got with the Fanzine.
The original image was slightly different to how I put it on my front cover. The
girl’s legs were in the image and she was slightly lifting her skirt to her knees
however for the side I wanted her to be in it didn’t look right and if I flipped the
image she was facing the wrong way. To get around this I rotoscoped her as
though she just had a long skirt on and rotoscoped her legs out by using the
Polygonal Lasso Tool. It took three attempts to get it to look normal but I am
happy with the end result. I also had to rotoscope a bit of her hair out as it didn’t
look good when the background was just wooden floor boards, rather than the
grass in the background like in the original image.
Origina
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Edited
Creative Abilities
6. To extend my flexibility we did tasks such as typography. I think that I made some good and
creative things with typography, it made me think about how I could make a simple thing a
lot more effective. Such as a word doing what the word is for example crash and bounce.
To help my creative ability, another task we did was to lean to use In Design. By doing this, I was set up to
start doing my newspaper articles and I knew how to do everything that I need too including putting the
correct sized images in. creating and sticking to the grids, making the font closer or further apart and
learning how to do a drop capital. If I never did this task, I wouldn’t have met the deadline and my work
would have been late from no knowing how to do things on the programme. As my practice on in Design
shows, I used guide lines and put an image in by putting it to the size wanted by doing so on Photoshop.
I created my Fanzine on Photoshop. There was a project we did in
particular which widened my Photoshop skills, that was Social
Action. I made a poster for the charity SASH on Photoshop. I learnt
how to use the feather tool when I did this, I needed to feather out
the background so that I could put some text on the poster. I
needed to use the feather tool around the black box underneath
the title on my fanzine so I was already aware of how to do this. I
also learnt how to use the burn tool, I had to use this to get rid of
the light patches in the poster and I also had to use it when making
my tabloid newspaper. I had to make the image of jimi hendrix blur
out and get rid of the light patches which I also used the burn tool
for them. It was a similar situation that I had with these two projects with my fanzine and poster. When I
made my poster I needed to use the SASH green colour to stick to the house theme but against pitch black
it looked too bright against the black so I had to change the opacity until I thought that it looked best. I also
had to do this on my fanzine with the faded black box under the white writing as the white wasn’t clear
enough over just the background.
The Experimental Photography project enabled me to be most creative with what I did, my final image of
double exposure was the most creative. I had a picture of hands, a picture of trees and another picture of a
river with a viaduct in. Putting all three images together and using a clipping mask was all new to me and I
think I did well and used the skills I learnt from that project into my fanzine by merging the image of the
hippies onto the polaroid images together.
7. My creative skills could have been developed. An example of this is on my tabloid article. The image
of Jimi Hendrix and the title isn’t very good as the image and black rectangle don’t fade into one
another as I didn’t put a bigger feather on it on Photoshop. I could improve this if I put a bigger
feather on it or put the opacity of the black rectangular box down. It was supposed to merge into
each other so it wasn’t viewable that it was a black box.
I could also improve this by making the font of ‘Woodstock’s’ and ‘celebrate’ the same width as I
wanted them the same length but this meant that one had to be thicker than the other making it
look uneven.
I could have improved the creative side of my fanzine by putting more into the article page. I had a
lot of text to fit on so could only fit on one proper image. I put in some cartoon images that are
related to hippies with the theme of ‘peace’ as I wanted to keep up the house style and add
images which were like the flowers. I only put three on near the title but I think that could be
improved by putting more into it, near the text so it looked more interesting to read. The ones
that I did add in, I got the images off Google and used the magic want to get rid of the bits I didn’t
want and then I used Hue/Saturation to get it to the colours that I wanted them to be.
8. Intentions
For my broadsheet, I created a total of three flat plans and chose one to base my product on. I
managed to make them very similar with the image and head line in the correct place. When it
came to creating it on in design, the pull quote looked better a bit further down and my article
was shorter than it thought when it was the correct font size therefore I made another short
story rather than just an advert. I achieved what I set out to do with my broadsheet and more
as I thought the picture would have to be low quality but I managed to find a good one and in
my feedback it says it is good quality even though it is from 1969. MY broadsheet flat plan was
the most helpful as it had the most things in it that I could follow, which made it easier and
quicker to make my product.
The flat plan I chose to base my tabloid upon was the third one I made. I stuck to this flat plan
well as it was what I intended to do. The only thing I changed was in stead of an advert down
the side I created a short story that would continue on another page. I managed to put the
image in with the headline which I thought might be difficult but I managed to create it on
Photoshop and then put it onto in design. I put little copy into this as from my research I learnt
that tabloids are more headlines and images with the rest of the stories on the inside.
For my fanzine I made a flat plan for each the front cover and the article page. I stuck
to them both and put the things in where it says I would. My flat plans for the fanzine
are the least detailed but they didn’t need to be, they didn’t have a lot of information
on and my fanzine was detailed with images yet still simple. They were the easiest to
make as there wasn’t as much text and it was mostly images.
Overall the intentions I had of making my products I did achieve. I mainly stuck to my
flat plans and my flat plans were what I was intending to make. I think that I made
better products than I thought that I would and my Photoshop skills that have
improved recently have helped this happen.
9. Appropriateness of audience
The audience for my broadsheet is the more educated people, who generally tend to be older and
are the social class of A and B. My broad sheet shows this because it has the full article on the
page.
It also reaches its audience by having a pull quote, this makes it look more formal and
professional. I used blue lines to make it stand out and separate it from the normal text. I also
used a blue line to separate the different stories on the page. I got this idea from a different
broadsheet newspaper.
I used a big bold serif font for the headline to make it look like a broadsheet paper and put the
date and website underneath like other broadsheets. The headline is in a font which is big and
simple.
The advert I created appeals to the audience as it is not about a celebrity, it is food vouchers so
more appealing to them.
The other story on my broadsheet newspaper is about the NHS, as it is a tabloid newspaper, the
small story needs to be about the government or something major in the news which isn’t about
celebrities.
The The Guardian, the media pack shows that 59% of readers have the social grade of A/B and
86% have a social grade of A/B/C1.
66% of the readers have a degree or higher education. The male to female ratio is nearly equal,
with 4% more males.
The tabloid newspaper I made has the audience of the working class people with a social grade of C1, C2 and D.
I aimed to target this audience with the help of my research, by using large images, interesting stories and large titles. I used big images
rather than lots of copy to make it more appealing to them. It if filled with adverts and big titles. I used a small story however I made it
different to my broadsheet one as I did it about the missing plane rather than something political or educational like the NHS and
government one on my broadsheet. The people who read tabloid papers usually don’t have degrees whereas the broadsheet people usually
have a high level of education.
This shows that the Sun has 32% of readers who are in the higher social grade. The other 68% of the people, who read it more, are more of the
working class social grade. The average age of the readers are young people who most likely don’t have a degree are 16-34 years old where as
the broadsheet audience have a better education.
10. Content, the style and skills
I have used all of my own copy. I tried to change it slightly to fit the different types of product better. For my tabloid, I used
word abbreviations and put more in whereas in my broadsheet newspaper I took them out to make it sound a lot more
formal. For my fanzine, I used the same copy as my tabloid with a few extra words added in to make it appeal to the
audience more.
For images, I chose them all off the internet. I had to make sure that they were good quality, which was a little hard as I
wanted real ones from the Woodstock Festival in 1969. I found some of the better quality ones and put them in. My tabloid
newspaper has a black and white picture of Jimi Hendrix on which is good because it shows that it was 50 years ago with the
black and white. On my broadsheet I used a picture of the audience which is in colour as I thought it looked more
professional for the broadsheet paper. In my fanzine, I got images oh hippies, some which were there at Woodstock at the
time and some that just show the fashion in the hippie craze at the time. I edited a lot of the images that I got off the
internet to make them more of my own.
I think I managed to portray the differences between tabloid and broadsheet well. They are still newspapers so they are
going to look similar but with the lay outs that I created I think I made them both look professional. I made the title’s in
different fonts so there was a clear difference between them just from looking at them. I put an advert across the top on
both of them like the ones that I researched. My tabloid paper is filled with big titles, images and adverts. This is what people
who read them want to see on the front page whereas my broadsheet has just a small image and a full story continued with
a smaller one on the NHS, their audience wants to read more rather than know about the celebrities latest whereabouts.
My tabloid has only one small part of two stories, which continue on the inside. I think that the pull quote on my broadsheet
makes it look a lot more professional, as I got the idea from a well known broadsheet newspaper.
The price on the tabloid fills a big corner and is very cheap, half the price of my broadsheet. The people who buy the tabloids
are usually working class so are after the cheaper things whereas the audience for my broadsheet don’t think about the
price, so it is smaller but still stands out to be cheap.
The skills I leant from this project on Photoshop was making the font background an image that I found elsewhere on the
internet. This helped my Fanzine title become a lot more creative and reached the audience more as it was more creative. I
used guide lines on In Design which I created myself to help me make the articles look more professional and everything was
in place more. I think that this idea would have been good for the Irn-Bru adverts that I made to keep everything looking
symmetrical. Another skill that I learnt was making the columns flow from one to the other on In Design which would have
been useful for the SASH project where there was a lot of copy and information on the products being used.
11. Skills developed & areas of improvement
The new skills I learnt in this project was how to use In Design. I had never used it before and I think I adapted to it quite well. The
first thing I practiced was making the columns of the articles flow from one to another which was useful as on my broadsheet I
used four columns. I also learnt how to make an image fir perfectly into the article by putting the measurements into Photoshop
and them putting it back into In Design, this helped prevent the image from distorting and blurring or stretching. I found this very
useful as my images from Woodstock are not great quality in the first place so this helped keep them in good quality.
The guidelines which you can adjust to make more rows or columns were useful to make the finished product have more of a
professional feel as it kept everything in line and not looking out of place or something slightly lower or higher down than the
other.
My fanzine page was the most creative I was able to be with Photoshop. The front page has three polaroid pictures on which I
created myself to give it the feel of the 1960’s. I created the little flowers around them and completely edited the shape of the
hippie girl o the front cover. This widened my knowledge on Photoshop and I wouldn’t have been able to do it was well if it wasn’t
for the previous projects like the SASH products and the Irn-Bru adverts.
My areas for improvement are my fanzine article and the titles put onto my tabloid. My fanzine article is very similar to its front
page, which is good but I think that there could have been more to it. I like that I have four different copies of it so I could see which
one worked best. I think the font for the article could have been better as it is just a small black standard font. I had to put a very
low opacity white box behind it or it wasn’t clear enough. If I was to do it again, I would make the font more interesting and
colourful so that the audience I was trying to reach would be more interested.
Another improvement I would make is the fonts put onto my tabloid newspaper. It is meant to look creative with images and fonts
however I feel that I could have done the fonts better, like putting them in a better place and choosing abetter font to make it look
like other existing
