Completed Double Page Spread

Below is my completed double page spread!

Double Page Spread Development

Below is the development of the double page spread in my newspaper in forms of a screenshot and my written articles.

Article 1

Now what on earth is this you may ask, well according to our sources, contacts and spys, it is in fact the new university’s student accomodation.

However can you not see the similarities between this and James May’s infamous lego house? I am pretty confident that they have hired ol’ James to build the accomodation after seeing him and 999 others bulding his two story house with 3.3 million bricks. Impressive huh? Or maybe they’re just being copy cats and if that is the case then I bet James May wish he put copyright on it now!

I know it is still being built, but come on, it’s not very attractive is it? What were they thinking? What student is going to want to live in a huge lego piece? Or are we (being oldies) missing the point? And let’s be honest, yellow, blue, grey and white, are hardly the most attractive blocks in a lego set are they?

This accomodation is set to be opened for the first year undergraduates for Southend University, no not the one in Southend which is Essex University but the new university that is to be opened along with the accomodation this September, however that is if everything goes to schedule, and if you have a quick glance to that photograph in the right hand corner over there and you look very closely, just so your nose is touching this paper and then, and only then you will notice there is not one builder or worker on that scaffolding! Tutut, they’re slacking already

As I look at the accomodation, I begin to wonder about the students living there. Is each lego piece a student room? Because realistically, the horizontal ones do not look tall enough to fit student in when they are standing up!

This is mind boggling I must say.

I bumped into a group of students walking past and stopped them to ask for their opinion, here we have Rebecca Marsh, 18, Vikki Farrington and Jake Walker both 17. Kelly Paxman also in the group and is a student at our own South East Essex College said:

“I think they’ve gone for the modern and edgy look to appeal to the students but it’s not very attractive”

“It looks like a maze, how am i supposed to get in?” - an excellent point from Jake Walker, we hunted around together for 10 minutes but there was no door to be seen, it’s an illusion, an illusion we tell you!

Another student we managed to stop by pretending we were a charity said:

“It looks like they’ve mixed up the accommodation plans with their tetris game” SPOT ON LOVE! spot on!

Well we had better stop critising this giant lego land (ok! i’m stopping) and just wait and see!

Article 2

Just under a week ago we set up SpEEc.com as your favourite newspapers website and we had a huge response to our dating section with hundreds of you signing up to meet other singletons.

Well, we’ve done it, we’ve made our first match that are apparently madly in love with each other already.

Emma Harrington spotted Alex Reid on the first day the website launched and got in contact, she said it was “love at first sight” (of the picture) and she couldn’t wait to meet him. Thankfully Alex felt exactly the same and met up for Mc Donalds later that day for their first date and a Mc Flurry.

The unusual looking pair are so happy together and say they are unseperable.The pair have even taken and sent in a picture to show how loved up they are, with a note saying how they just fit together and how thankful they are to SpEEC.

Well, we try our best!

Article 3

CONGRATULATIONS STEPHEN NUTKINS who has just recieved the first A* this year, the very special grade has only been introduced this year so we are very proud, he achieved the grade in English Language which is fantastic! To show how pleased we are we are going to take this space to celebrate!

Woooooooooooooo hoo woo woooohoooo!!! yeah yeah Wooooooooop!!!! wooooooooeeeeeee woooooaaahhh wowowowow WOW!!!!!! wooo ooooooooo wowowowow yeahhhhhh! Yeahhhhh, wooooooooo yeah yeah yeah wahey!!!

YAY, yay yaya yaaaaay, congratulations Stephen, well done! You are now our number one student woo hoooooo, yeah yeah! wow woooo wooo wooopeeeeee!! YEAHwoooooooooo STEPHEN NUTKINS woooooo wowoowowowoeooeoeoeoew!!

Stephen Nutkins: If this isn’t enough to show how proud we are of you please cut out the scoff voucher below to claim a jam doughnut!

Double Page Spread Ideas

• The current weather
• Student accommodation
• New newspaper
• New year New decade
• Club Events
• Exam Time!
• College merging

I've taken my bullet pointed list from my previous post of story ideas for the front cover and I only used two - The current weather conditions and a snippet about Clubs in Southend, so I am taking the list again to use for story ideas for my double page spread.

More than likely I am going to concentrate on

• College merging
• Student Accommodation

As I already have the digital photography ready for these articles and they are very important news within the college at the moment.

Completed Front Page

This is my completed front page of SpEEC newspaper!

Digital Photography

Below are all my digital photos I have taken for my newspaper. The photographs below are in their original state before they have been edited for my newspaper, this is why some aren't in the correct orientation.

Front Page Development

Below shows my development of my front page, there are some screenshots and my written articles to be included.

1.

Below are the articles I am going to include on my front cover, keeping in mind I am creating a parody newspaper and need to show this in my articles and images.

Article 1

We thought it was about time that the students of South East Essex College deserved a college magazine to keep them up to date with absolutely everything to do with the college and the local area and what better time to introduce this brand spanking new newspaper than the new year, and what’s more, it’s the start of a new decade!

We are attempting to provide you all with a humourous newspaper to keep you informed of current affairs, not student / teacher ones, but current.

Article 2

Where on earth were you all on Friday, aye?! We were worried sick that maybe every single student had been abducted by aliens or something, everything was running through our heads! Is it not a coincidence that it was the first snow day this year? Hmm...

Here at SEEC we had a record breaking attendence low, which I guess we should be celebrating? Or should I be saying that it was very irresponsible of you all? You shouldn’t be enjoying yourself!

The attendance on Friday was..... are you ready... a huge 9%! Yes a record 9% of you were in. This included just a few degree students, but of course they would come in, I need not say anymore, and us, yes all the publishers for SpEEC came in, of course... cough, cough.

As we were pretty much the only staff in on Friday we were pretty bored and so done a little bit of research to make sure all your reasons were valid for not attending and we are delighted to inform you (and to drop you in it) that all the trains were running on time and the buses into college and southend were only delayed by approximately ten minutes!

As you can see we have supplied you with the picture above as we know none of you got the pleasure of seeing the college on Friday, and believe us, you missed out! It doesn’t look like any other day does it. So look who’s laughing now.

The temperature reached an all time low in 30 years on, according to that weather lady on GMTV, but apparently we should expect it to continue. So watch this space.

Photography Schedule

I plan to take my photography for my magazine on Monday 18th January at 11:45am. Currently I don't need any actors so I don't need to organise any of that, just rely on myself and my camera.
I will be shooting in and around the college and also taking pictures of the student accomodation that is currently being built.

Front Page Story Ideas

I'm just going to make a bullet point list of some story ideas I could write about in my newspaper.

• The current weather - snow blizard/coldest winter in 30years
• Student accommodation currently being built
• The fact that it is a new newspaper
• New year / New decade
• Club events in and around Southend
• Exam time!
• College merging

When I come to creating my Newspaper in full I will decided what stories to choose from the above list.

Page Layout

Below I have scanned in some layout designs for my newspaper:

I'm going to analyse each layout so I can get a better perspective of what layout to choose for my newspaper:

1. The front page of this layout is neatly laid out however now i'm not too keen on the two pictures next to each other, in production I don't think it would look that good and make it look too busy. Although the double page spread here I really like, I think it is well presented and believe it would work well with my parody genre with a large photo in the middle and having a big heading across both pages. This is definately me favourite spread.

2. Layout 2 is very text dominated and I done this for a reason to see the contrast from layout 3 and to see what it could look like, however I think this layout would look much better on an international or broadsheet newspaper. Which is why I am eliminating this choice.

3. The double page spread in layout 3 is picture dominated and although I would like a few pictures I think this layout looks quite busy and messy which doesn't look very professional. However the front page of this layout I really like as it is well presented, has a good balance of picture and text and I am keen on the idea of having snippets down the side of my newspaper to show small articles or what other main stories are in the newspaper.

After a lot of consideration I think i'm actually going to take the first double page spread layout and combine it with the third front page.

Now I have chosen my layout I am going to produce the layout design - combining the two different layouts - on photoshop, by computer generating it it will give me a much neater layout to work with and a clearer idea of how it will look. I will upload the layout below.

Above is the computer generated layout design I want for my newspaper - I have tweaked it slightly by removing the adverts as because of copyright issues I can't advertise anything in Southend and just added a small little picture in the bottom left right hand corner of the front page.

Starting My Front Page Design

I'm now going to start producing my front page for my newspaper so I am now going to refer to my previous 'Researching local newspaper' blog and list everything I need to include on my front page that I can see is common on all the newspapers I looked at.

• Date and Time
• Price
• Story relevant photo
• Caption for photos
• Snippets
• Body text
• Flag
• Heading
• Sub-heading
• Jumpline
• Newspaper website

Additionally I need to look at typical newspaper layouts and produce some thumbnail designs for my own newspaper layout.

Master Pages

This is screenshot of my master pages that I created in InDesign, a master page is a publishing term for a template, I have set these up so now every page I create for my newspaper will already have this information and design on.

As you can see below, I have the title of the newspaper (SpEEC) printed aswell as the date in the outside top corner of the page then I have created a thin blue stroke going across each page at the top to separate the title and date from the news and then in the bottom outer corners of each page I have taken the college logo (the red shape) and created it into a page number image, where each page number will be present on top. This shows the college being involved, additionally, the red and blue combination of this page represent the colleges house style colours.

For the front page I have added the newspaper logo, date, price, a stroke and a footer on the master page as this will be on every front page and always in the same place as you can see directly below.

House Style Newspaper Font

Below is a print screen of my font style template that i created in InDesign, as you can see the headings for my newspaper will be in Helvetica Neue, the sub-headings in Prestige Elite Std and the body text in Century.

Although my newspaper is going to be a college parody I have still chosen typical newspaper fonts as I don't want to challenge the font conventions of a newspaper as I need the students to still be able to read it easily. So from my research I have realised these fonts are pretty common among newspapers, especially the heading and body text I chose which are of the most importance, for the sub-headings I have challenged it a little as i felt my newspaper still need to have edge and look contemporary to relate to the students, so instead of having modern text or typical newspaper font I have gone a different route and gone for a type-writing style which holds connotations of old style writing and publishing.

New Newspaper Title, developed and final!

The logo above I designed through developing my sketches and I was sure it looked good for a newspaper logo/title however when I showed it to peers and my tutor they said it doesn't look very strong so after a lot of work and development I designed the one below which got much better feedback so below is my completed, final logo!

Newspaper Typography

Before I redesign my new title I'm firstly going to research newspaper typography and newspaper fonts so I will be able to see if there is an obvious choice for my newspaper flag, headlines and body text.




The diagram above shows all the technical terms of typography. These have given me a more in-depth understanding of letters and words and how they are presented. This is again shown below in another image with a few extra terms.

Below is another example of some typography terms but has also mentioned the technical terms of spacing.

Above Sans Serif and Serif font is mentioned, below is a diagram showing the differences between them.

As you can see Serifs on a font are informally called the 'feet' on the letter.

From finding these images they have helped me get a better grasp on typography and will hopefully help me in considering my fonts for my newspaper.

While Researching I came across this image and study below, which has really enlightened me and I didn't realise before a newspaper would use so many fonts!

This copy of a local Los Angeles newspaper shows 22 different fonts and typefaces on the front cover alone!

www.ascendercorp.com/pdf/Ascender_Corp_Fonts_on_the_Front_Page_11_19_2004.pfd

The link above will direct you to a Font study which states that Poynter, Franklin Gothic, Helvetica, Utopia, Times New Roman, Nimrod, Century, Interstate, Bureau Grotesque and Miller are the most popular typefaces in newspapers.