Flatplan and rationale - main product/front page and second page of newspaper

Flatplan and rationale - Poster

Deconstruction of poster products

Deconstruction of newspaper products

Resources/equipement Needed

Resources Needed:

• A collection of newspaper's similar to my product 
• A collection of posters similar to my product
• Use of a camera
• Use of a projector
• Use of a computer which has Photoshop
• WIX account
• Blogger account
• Twitter account
• Facebook account
• Consent from Michael McKittrick and Rachel Black for photographs of themselves
• Consent from my Carole Black that I can take photographs inside her house on a specific date and time.

I plan to book the studio after my lesson and as my lesson is at the beginning of the week I will have a good chance of getting the Tuesday required for taking my photographs.

Generic Conventions

Conventions I plan to follow
I plan to follow most of the conventional features when creating my products:

• As I plan on using informative stories that my audience would find interesting to read. 
• My target audience are typically the age range for reading newspapers normally.
• I plan to use bright colour to appeal to a younger audience however understand that typically older people read newspapers but if I use young attracting colours I could potentially attract both young and old.
• I plan on using a mixture of both text and images and feel that using a combination of both it will attract both styles of readers as some prefer image based information and others like text based information.
• I plan to advertise the rest of my products on each product for example I plan to put the website on my newspaper and poster however I don't want to advertise it too heavily as I understand that advertising a free product on something they had to pay for could discourage people and make them only view the free version and although I want people to look at my product I need people to buy the product if I plan to make my newspaper successful.
• I plan to attract my audience by trying to appeal to both genders and involve stories that appeal to gender stereotypes for example for men sport and for woman I will put shopping advertisement.
• I am going to appeal to my audience by making my product value for money and when researching I have found that people would not pay more than £1 and so I am going to sell my product at 50p.
• I plan to use font that is conventional for a newspaper for example Times New Roman - this is a newspaper font that I am using for my masthead.
• I plan to use advertisement in my product and in doing so will receive money which will allow my product to grow as having more money will allow the newspaper to interview more people and could even get the product on new technology etc.
• The layout and style of image I am going to use in my products are going to be a high a quality as a professional newspaper as I plan to use a high quality camera to take the images and I am going to look very carefully at other newspapers to see what style of layout I am going to use.
• For the front cover of my newspaper I plan to follow the same conventions and place excerpts of a story and then have the remainder of the story on the inside of the newspaper and this will entice people into reading the rest of the newspaper as the articles have been placed so that audiences will have to look through parts of the paper to find the article which is a tactic which allows people to read the story they were looking for as well as reading other articles on the page that they were not reading about on the front page. I have placed articles together which follow the same style which will appeal to them and hopefully if I have done it successfully they will read the remainder of the paper.
• I plan to label articles with the writers name so that they can get recognition.
• I also plan to label articles with bullet points which list where they will find the rest of the article which will entice readers to read more of the stories as there will only be a small excerpt of the article which will entice the reader to want to read on.
• I plan on adding the weather and the lottery as a feature as this is conventional to newspapers as this allows people to view what the results are and also what the weather is going to be like.

Conventions I plan to change/challenge

• I plan to challenge the conventional boring colour scheme as I would like to use a multiple amount of colouring in my poster, I would like to use the same styling in my other products however understand that if I were to add a lot of colouring in my newspaper or website it can look unprofessional and un-thoughtout and so plan to use only parts of the colouring.
• I plan to be the only newspaper that only provides happy news in the local area as many newspaper have stories which tell audiences how good things are happening in their area however I will be the only newspaper that will exclusively deliver this.

Development of my work for my second page

This is my first attempt at creating the second page and as you can see I ave followed the conventions of a newspaper by having a small column of information on the left hand side and then for the rest of the page it full of articles except from the bottom of the page where the advert is located. There is adequite amount of both images and text on the page however the page doesn't look very professional as it seems to be full of white space and yet there is something in every space of the page. To correct this I decided to have a look at other newspapers to give me an idea as to how I can re-arrange the page to make it look more professional.

After looking at real newspapers for inspiration I decided that it wasn't my content that was the problem   as the format has been used elsewhere as I used other stories to help me create my own stories and so I knew it was the layout I had to look at. I moved the main story to the far left of the screen, resized the images and the title, added new advertisement, took away an advert, re-arrange the stories and i moved the weather article down to the bottom so that it takes up a little less space. I added the writer of the article and although this feature was not on many newspapers I decided that when you look at a article I want people to know who wrote it so they can receive recognition for the article and I felt it was a conventional element to add into the newspaper page even though local newspapers 

I was really pleased with the new look of the second page however felt that the section with the weather seemed to let the page down as it didn't look as professional as I wanted it to and the layout of it made it look easy and un thought out and so I decided to change it by reducing the size of the lottery and I also decided to add a paragraph of phone numbers to help publicise the newspaper using phone numbers and email addresses to allow people to get in touch with the newspaper. I have changed the layout of the page numbers, date and website as I was asked to create two pages of a newspaper and it not only made more sense to have two pages that followed each other but also when I looked at newspaper to see where they would advertise the weather, lottery and phone and email information and most of the time newspapers have this information on the second page in and this is why I have chosen to put this information on the second page rather than the 3rd page which means now my newspaper is following another convention for newspapers.

After creating the new and improved bottom section of the newspaper I felt that it still wasn't working as I felt that there was too much blue in that area and you couldn't quickly identify that they were different section and so I decided to get rid of the blue background for the 'Place an advert & Other information' and the reason why I needed to move the text over the width of this small area is because I decided that as this was a local newspaper it didn't necessarily need to have a map of the U.K it just needed to have weather map of the area as to where the newspaper is going to be released which meant there was space to be filled and so I decided to move the lottery section up and then move the phone information so that it stretched all the way along the bottom. I decided that the lottery was using to similar colours to the rest of that section and so to distinguish between the two I decided to lower the opacity of the shape so that the colours of the text and box would look different. I also decided that to show a clear anding between the weather and the lottery I decided to add a border so that that box showed clear that it was just for the lottery nothing else.

I really liked the blue and white contrast for the information and so decided to change that back to how I had it. I changed the layout of the lottery and so it now follows: the title, a single image of the logo and then the lottery results below that and I have designed it this way so that the weather and the lottery fit together and as you can remember earlier I had a problem distinguishing between the weather, lottery and the information section and so I have decided to use the more conventional colours for the weather map and so changed the colours from blue to green. I have slightly changed the font size for  the weather and the weather so that they fit together perfectly and I have even used the rulers on Photoshop so that I could see that the two match up perfectly. I have also added another information section in the bottom corner of the page and it list the Page by page information which lists articles that might interest you in the remainder of the newspaper - this feature helps you to engage your audience into reading the rest of the newspaper without having them look at the rest of the newspaper as this small section lists a variety of subjects that will entice my target audience based on the information I have gathered about them.

This is how I have developed my work and this is the end result from what I have learned from designing my second page. I have changed the colouring for the information section at the bottom as I felt that this was too distraction as the articles needed to be the most noticeable feature on the page. Once I had finished with the look of the bottom section of the newspaper I noticed that there was no distinguishing line that showed my audience that the articles were different from the weather and the weather from the articles and so I decided to use  feature that the Sunderland Echo use to create an interesting barrier from article to advertisement and so created a box similar to the Sunderland Echo's, as I was already working on Photoshop all I needed to do was click onto the shape tool, chose a colour that fit with my colour scheme and then draw the shape in the place that would best fit my newspaper. I drew a long rectangle the length of the article, wrote in the box See page 30 for Council's Green Restaurant Awards and then I added a circle on the left of the rectangle and then placed a '+' in the middle of the circle. This feature allowed my audience to distinguish between audience and the information section.