Fl evaluation

Factual Layout Evaluation

Nicola Kilgallon

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 processTo 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.

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 thatthey were taken in the 60’s yet they still look good enough quality for a newspaper. I think that my work doeslook 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 noticedthat they use old fashioned fonts for their headlines, such as , which is the most noticeableand 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 dateand 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.

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.

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.

Original Edited

Creative Abilities

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.

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.

IntentionsFor 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.

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.

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.

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