Reconsidering Target Audience

I have now completed my poster and my website for my newspaper product I realised that I need to make my product for an older audience, it is a good plan to create a product just for young people as there isn't anything in the market that has a product like this. Unfortunately I soon realised that there is a very small niche of people that would be interested in my product and the fact that this is a new newspaper, which needs to do quite well as it needs to be successful to be able to create more newspaper products and if a small amount of people are reading it chances are that is not going to be enough to generate a big enough amount of money to make a profit.

I still want it to have a young edge to it as I don't want it to be too boring and so have decided for the poster to use strong vibrant colours to appeal to a slightly older audience 30+.

New version of Poster

I had previously made this for my newspaper poster products and once I had finished it I haven't been very happy with it as it was very cluttered in layout, not what a poster should look like as it resmebled a flyer more than a poster. I then looked onto the internet and my research poster images that I have found.   

I then found the Guardian's newspaper poster and so took the inspiration from the layout and style of the poster, a element that I liked about the poster was the fact it wasn't cluttered. 

I decided to add my own stamp onto the poster and so added three curvy pieces of text, your positive paper, as this is the tagline that I have chosen for my product because my product is all about telling people about happy and positive news in the local area. I went onto the internet and found a happy quote that reflected the theme of my product 'Open your eyes and notice the beauty in this wonderful world', but I am only creating a local product and so decided to change the quote slightly by changing the word world to area. Another quote I have used for this poster was 'a breath of fresh air' that I have thought of to describe my product something I would hope a newspaper critic would say about my product, I have also used this quote in my previous poster. I have put the masthead i this poster near to the bottom for this poster and have also added a drop shadow to the image to make the border lines around the image less noticeable.

 <----Drop shadow screen shot

I wanted to have the same layout of the website replicating in the poster and so decided to add strips of a yellow and grey box to divide the top of the poster and the linked pages at the bottom and by adding this strip there was a space to add a price for the newspaper.

I thought that this yellow and grey strip was too closed off, too structured and too much on the  poster and so decided to get rid of it. I then moved the text around so that the linked pages were together and then I moved the publishing image and name over to the left as I want this to be a bigger and more noticable feature as I want people to also recognise the publisher. I needed to add a price element to the poster and as I have order the text so that there is more pieces of text inside of the tag line and so decided to move the tagline slightly to the right to fit in the extra piece of text and I wanted the text to follow the style of the other text on the poster and so used the same colour style from the positive tagline. I also add a lighter grey to the masthead by using the Paint Bucket Tool and changed all the little pieces of the dark grey to the light grey and the reason I have done this is because with the dark grey it stood out too much and although I want the masthead to stand out I want the rest of the content to be noticeable also, and so used a grey colour to match the lightness of the poster. I have also kept the drop shadow on the image however I have changed the shadow so it is a lot lighter shade in colour, again so that it keeps to the style of the poster - light, happy and young friendly.

<---Drop shadow screen shot

I have now decided to make the poster a little more simple as I felt that it was a little too cluttered and so I have got rid of the old masthead and have in its place wrote Sunny Side and Your Positive Paper and I have used Times new roman font for this text. I have got rid of the quotes and have moved the price on the right hand side in-between positive and paper. I have also moved the extra information so that there is a strip of information rather than a box like structure of information and I have also resized the information so that the masthead and the graphics are the main focus of the newspaper however the extra information still needs to be there to advertise the product however I don't want it to be the main focus and that is why I have moved and resized it.

Second Ancillary Task - Poster

My original flat plan for my poster looked very minimal and at the time this is the style that appealed to me and was conventional to the poster, however after creating my website and realised how much is needed to put into a website and what is needed to put onto my product and so decided before I create my poster I need to create another flat plan as I need to have something to follow from to help me when creating bits of my work and so designed this poster as you can see I have followed the poster pretty much to the letter except to alter font style and font size. I have used the correct colouring for the poster to follow the convention of using the same colour palette. 

The image on the left shows my first draft of my poster and as you can see I have followed my poster guidelines pretty well and have used bold colours similar if not exact from the website. I have decided to add more colour into the poster and so decided to put a grey background, lighter than the masthead colour as I want the masthead to stand out and the darkest colour on a image is the first thing people see, which is why I have put the colour of the masthead in a dark grey colour. I have decided to use a tag line of 'YOUR POSITIVE PAPER' as this newspaper is all about the good things that is happening in your local area and I want to change that I want people to pick up a paper and feel happy after reading it now feel depressed and so this why I have chosen that particular tag line.Once the poster was complete I then decided that there needed to be a few alterations as I felt that this layout made the poster feel too all over the place and there was too much for the reader to digest and in parts there were sections of empty space and so I decided to change things around. I moved the 'EVERYDAY ONLY 50p'  from the bottom yellow section to the top section at the top so that I can then get rid of the yellow strips at the bottom. I have changed the style of text for the tag line from Times New Roman to Abadi MT Condensed Ex, which made the tag line stand out a lot more. I have added more of the yellow for the font so that the highlight included local news report not just news report as I want the local part of the news to be advertised. I have moved the images and the text for the Facebook, Twitter, Website and publishing so that it is in a group of 2x2. I have also added a bullet point style to the hyperlinks (News, What's On etc) so there was more order to the poster.

More text added/changed

I looked at the website as a whole and found that some of the adverts just looked like articles as there where no clear labelling that cut off the two (articles and advertisement) and so decided to add headings     for every box of adverts so that it was more obvious.

After completing the labelling for the adverts I also felt that the different articles didn't look like there was any more of the article for you to follow onto as I had just hyperlinked the text rather than adding a read more hyperlink however this is something that came up in a peer assessment of my work and so decided to add the read more underneath each article.

Image change

I have decided to change my images so that some of them include people and in some of my images I wanted to edit them to a better standard.



The original image that I made is on the left, and I decided that because I had already have this image for another article I needed to make the decision to keep one or the other or even change both of them. I decided to change the article about Student Lock-in and decided to take images of a student carrying their shopping. I can see looking back that the bags look a little blurry, I am happy with this as it shows that the person is moving, not just standing on the spot. As you can see I still wanted to show that the image was 'taken at the Bridges' and so changed the image from a yellow colour to a black colour (as this is the colour of the actual logo). I decided to put the image on top of the image as this is a conventional way to label the image.

This is the other Bridges image that I have used and this article is used for the Business Award article.  I originally wanted to use the Bridges Logo beside the article as this is where the event is going to be held however similarly to the other Bridges image I wanted to include more people in the images and so decided to create a projection which included the different shops that are in the Bridges and again the original Bridges logo, the Business Award sub-heading and most importantly a person in the image to act as the Centre Boss of the Bridges.

Another image that I decided in my opinion needed to be changed was the soccer charity article as in the beginning I didn't realise that I could use a model instead of the actual person and so decided to take an image of a model in the studio and then place the image of the 'soccer player' on top of the image. I wanted to have the model on the top left hand side of the image as this is where I had placed the Bridges image previously and so wanted to use the same style so that the images followed a convention unfortunately if I had done this the goal post would have covered up and it would have just looked like a normal field rather than a soccer field and so used Photoshop to flip the image horizontally so that I could keep to the convention of the layout of my images and still be able to see the goal.

The first image shows the original image before I edited it as I lay the jumper down onto the box and thought that this relaxed approach would make the jumper look good but unfortunately after editing and then adding it onto the website it just looked messy and you couldn't really see what the jumper looked like.

I then took another image which has the jumper on a hanger and by putting it on the hanger it shows the style and length of the jumper. As you can see in comparison from the image to the left to the image on the right you can see that I have got rid of the background and redrawn the hanger as the hanger was hanging off the chair and I wanted in to show the hanger on the jumper so its not hanging in the air.

Colour change

After completing most if not all of the structure work I have decided to look at the colour of my website in a lot more depth as I expressed in previous post I am still not happy with the colour of the website and so decided to have a play about with the layout of the colours just to see if that made any difference.

I started off with the background strip behind the masthead with this bright yellow colour as I felt that this bright colour at the top of the page would help to tell the people clicking onto this page the three colours in my colour palette: yellow, grey and white. Unfortunately after discussion with both my peers and my lecturer they agreed that this is the part of the website which didn't particularly work very well and so decided to have a look at what other colours would work and so tried lighter shades of yellow, darker shaded of yellow and then I tried white, which din't seem to make the background seem very appealing and so decided to go for a two tone effect by changing from white to grey and so looked at all the greys shades and seeing which seemed to work the best and so finally ended up with this style below.

I finished my website, to a point that I was happy with and then moved onto the poster and created several different versions and ended up creating a bright poster, I then went back to my website to see what information I had used on my website the Facebook, Twitter pages. I really like the use of different colours for the tag line and so I am going to use this style in both my poster and my website.

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There were also other things that needed to be changed and also after changing the background strip it became apparent that the strong matching yellow background was too much for your eyes to take in, with just one look and so to tone it down I decided to add a background behind the text so that the yellow wasn't so strong looking on the page. I again flicked between what colour to use behind the text but felt that by using the grey for the background strip it would work well for behind the text also. Once seeing the effects after changing the colour and still keeping the yellow behind it made more sense and it also made the text stand out a lot more as the colours made the text easy to read.

I have changed the background for the background so that instead of a bold yellow there is a grey on grey combination and then I will use yellow at specific features on the website the reason why I have chosen to only use yellow in certain areas of my website is because I felt that yellow was such a bold colour and by using yellow in the whole website there would be know effect of using it as there would be know feature colour sections and so decided to change the colour to follow this theme.

This is the new and improved look of my website because after looking at other competitors of my newspaper products I noticed that the colours I would have been using would not appeal to my audience and when you look at other newspapers you can see the running theme of other newspapers running through and realised that I was not following the conventions of the newspaper for the website and so decided to totally re-work the look of my website and I wanted to include the parts of my there products into my website and as  it is already conventional to use the same article on your newspaper as your website along with other media products I decided to add the same colours and style as my poster as I felt that my poster product looked really professional and I wanted the professional element to be a running style throughout my products and so decided to add the coloured text from my poster and place them on the side masthead.
As well as the side additions I decided that the way in which I had the masthead featured it wasn't making the most of the space and more than anything it was wasting space and so after feedback I got recommended to go to the BBC's website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ and use their layout for the masthead and so I went to work and moved the text and image into an appropriate place. I used the sam e Times New Roman font however this time I used blue for the colour and decided to make the text a lot bigger so that it would fit the space better. I felt that when placing this text on the website it would be easier to use if it was a image and so took a screenshot of the text and then placed the image on the top of the website. I then changed the colouring of the masthead so that the bridge was blue the background was white and I left the colour of the road as black. I then started to experiment on where the masthead should go and felt that the masthead for the BBC used the masthead however they positioned it so that only part of it was showing and this is a good idea as you still get to see what the masthead is however the space is being used effectively. So when experimenting I positioned it in the same way the BBC has done and partially covered the top and bottom of the masthead, this looked good however with the strong colours of the masthead image and the masthead text it was hard to focus on one of them as they seemed to be fighting for attention and so it was recommended to me to lower the opacity of the image, which is something I done on Photoshop and then placed the image onto WIX after turning the opacity down. Once I had turned the opacity down I felt that the masthead images still wasn't making the most of the space and so I experimented and flipped the image so that the image was facing the opposite way using the editing equipment on wix.com:

I still like the idea of using different coloured font for the home page, news and what's happening pages and so decided to place them back in, I also needed to change the colour scheme for the rest of the website and so needed to change the colours and so right clicked over the titles, clicked onto Change Style, click edit style next to the button lab led Button Menu  and a box will appear and this is where I changed the different options so that certain colours would appear once the button had been hovered over or pressed etc. I decided to use the same blue colour as the masthead text so there was a continuity of colour throughout. Once I was happy with the choices I clicked onto the OK button to see how the new button changes would work in action and so clicked onto the preview button to see how the live website would work with my audience. 

After sorting the top half of the website out I needed to make a start on the rest of it and so decided to add a pastel blue colour for the background the main story, I then added another box for just the text and the reason for doing this is to reinforce the colour theme for the website.

I went to the side option and clicked onto the plus icon, clicked onto Shapes & Lines and then clicked onto Box and chose the colouring that fits with my colour scheme.

I then moved onto the rest of the articles and I decided I needed to go for a more professional look and so made it look very plain and sleek and the only colouring was for the sub-titles for the articles, the colour is the same colour as the text masthead and again I want to use only a small amount of this colour so that when it is used people recognise this as being the colour palette for the website. 

The colouring for the advertisement was not changed too heavily as I don't want to use the blue colour from the colour palette although I have created this I don't want my audience to think that this is another story and so I have changed the layout of the advert, used two images and have used a different colour for the background of the article. The reason why I have chosen to use this yellow colour is because I felt the colouring although not the colours used in my colour scheme I felt that because I am using a mixture of colours for the top beside the masthead this colours fits in well and I didn't want to use a random colour just so it was different I want it to fit in with the styling of my website.

Again I have not changed the information part at the bottom as the colours I used previously have been reused in this new colour scheme and so it fits in well and looking at this part of the website i feel that it fits in well and I feel that this feature looks very professional as well as letting my audience know more information.

Progress Update

Progress Update
So far I have been able to create my product, had a change around with the colour palette of the website and tried a variety of different style so that I made full use of the colour palette I have chosen - grey, yellow and black. I have uploaded al the text content onto the website, I have already taken my images but some of the images could have been improved and so I am going to retake the images, I have already started re-taking the studio images as I wasn't happy with the jumper studio image and have already re-taken the image but I still want to re-take the charity fundraiser image as I never included an image of the person involved in the fundraising I just had a field but most of my images didn't include a model and so to correct this I decided to chose images which I could physically get somebody to stand in the image.

How happy I am with product
I am not 100% with the product as I have mentioned in the paragraph above I want to redo some of the images so that it looks like more work has been taken into the image because although I have taken thought into how to frame and composition the image it is a more professional and conventional element if you actually include people in the images. I am still not 100% with the colour of the website and I have tried different designs but I am still not happy.

What I need to do to be happy with the product
To make me completely happy with the product I am going to evaluate what works and what doesn't in my product and then whatever doesn't work will be scrapped in favour of something that does. I am thinking of changing the colour strip at the top of the page as t is quite a bold colour I am thinking of changing it so that when I add splashes of yellow into the rest of the page it will be more eye catching.
Up until now without having changed the yellow strip on my page I feel that on a scale of 0---------10 I am about 7.
I have now changed the yellow strip to a tone of grey but I have chosen to use a lighter tone from the main strip so that it will give the illusion of a border/frame.
After seeing this improvement I am now around 8 on a 0---------10 scale.

Time management - Bracelet image

I was in the studio and needed to take images for my adverts and so brought with me some jewellery, I placed the bracelet in a box which was suitable to put a bracelet in. I then had a selection of images to choose from which used the bracelet and once I had chosen the image I wanted to use I then opened the image onto Photoshop.

I used the Polygon lasso tool as this would allow me to carefully go around the box, I have also used the Refine Edge tool once I had finished going around the box as this will allow me to choose a softer edge,  you can also make it move the edge so it fades further away so that you have a better finnish as it will feather edges so that the edit will look more professional.

 This is the end result after editing the image on Photoshop and I will now be able to place the image on my www.wix.com account beside my advert.

Newspaper and Website comparison

After starting my first ancillary task I needed to know that if the website article would use the same information as the newspaper articles because if they don't use the same information I will need to make a start on re-writing the articles. As you would imagine you would get more in a newspaper article because you have to pay for the newspaper but this is not the case they are exactly the same:

• They have the same main sell-line.
• They have the same images
• They have the same article (same ordering or sentences)
• They have the same images information underneath the image

However they do have some differences from a newspaper and to the newspaper's website:

• Although they use the same images they have cropped the images down on the newspaper ad I think they have done this because it cost more to print on paper and so the more compact your articles are the less you have to pay to get the newspaper printed.
• They have the same images information underneath the image however the layout of where the information is displayed is different as on the newspaper they have it on the newspaper in a white box and for the website they have it displayed underneath in grey writing.
• The layout for the newspaper and the website is different as there is a paragraph space for every sentence in the article however for the newspaper they have used a a paragraphing style for the article but they have not left a space between each as the sentence is directly underneath.

Website

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  Newspaper