Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For the newspaper pages, i took into account the following about the codes and conventions;

The Guardian:

1. The text is small and covers most of the page.

2. The text is a serif style (where the letters are more defined than normal san serif fonts)

3. The images on the page do not take up more than half of the page

The Sun:

1. These papes are often dubbed 'red-tops' this is due to the fact that almost all of their mastheads are white in a red background. This is often the case in tabloid newspapers because it helps them stand out amongst the broadsheets.

2. The use of colour on the front pages is also very obvious, they use normally reds and blues as they stand out very well against white backgrounds.3. For the main feature, there is not alot of text, normally there is a large picture with the first paragraph of the article which continues inside the paper.

3.The font in the text is larger than that of a broadsheet

The Echo:

1. The Cover image takes up a large fraction of the page.

2. The text in the article is larger than that of a broadsheet.

3. The main headline is as big as the masthead.

4. The advert will normally be for a local establishment.

5. The main article will probably be about a local event that probably wouldn't get into any national papers.

I chose to combine the codes and conventions of mainly the local newspaper (The Echo) and the tabloid newspaper (The Sun). The codes that i used were;

- The main headline would be as large as the masthead.

- The adverts on my page is for a local establishment.

- I used a variety of colours on the page.

I developed the idea of a coloured masthead by changing the theme of mine. Most are just plain text in a box, however i made mine to look like a london road sign. This is challenging the normal codes and conventions of a masthead, as there are no mastheads that are made to look like something else.

For the website homepage, I noticed that all of the websites that i looked at had a similar layout. They all had one main picture with accompanying text, and a number of smaller pictures with text. On each website they also had the masthead at the top of the page. The one code that i changed was that the background of each website was white, i decided to make mine black, this is because i think that it made the boxes with text in stand out more.

How effective was your combination of the main product and the ancillary texts?

For my main text, i used the layout of a local newspaper, but i changed the style. I made it look alternative, and something that people would be more interested in buying it as it appears to be more exciting than other newspapers. I continued this style through into the ancillary texts. I used the same font for the headlines in the two newspaper pages, and the same font for the articles. I also adopted a colour scheme for all of the products, the colours that i used primarily were, white, black, dark red and grey, with the red coming from the masthead. I used the same fonts and colours throughout the project so that if people were to see the website and the newspaper, they would be able to make an immediate link. The colours that i chose are not bright, this could have made it boring, but the combination of the style of headlines and the brightly coloured pictures ensured that it did not look dull.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The first way in which i got feedback from the audience was when i did a survey of 20 people, male and female, aged 18 - 30. I asked two questions, the first was, 'What kind of newspaper so you read, broadsheet, tabloid or local?' 12 people (60%) said tabloid, 7 people said broadsheet (35%), and only 1 person (5%) said local newspaper. This made me realise that it could possibly be quite a hard task to make a local newspaper appeal to a younger age group. I then asked 'An increase in which of these would make you read your local newspaper more, music, sport, arts, events, or news?' 6 people (30%) said music, 6 people (30%) said events, 4 people (20%) said sports, 3 people (15%) said news, and 1 person (5%) said arts.

The results of this survey made it clear that if i wanted to make my newspaper appeal to a younger audience, i would have to focus more on music and events.

Throughout the project i asked for feedback a number of times to see how i could improve my products. I found that this helped me tweak the pages very easily and effectively as i was getting the opinions of people in the age group that i was targeting.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The use of new media technologies was very apparent in my work. For the newspaper front page, I used Adobe InDesign, this is because i had learnt from previous work that this program was the best to creat text based publication due to the ease of use, and the column system which made the text layout almost perfect without editting it. I also used InDesign for the second page of the newspaper for the same reasons. For the production of my website, i used both Photoshop and Dreamweaver. I used Photoshop for the design part of it, this is because from previous experience, i learnt that this was a good program to use for image based and design work, with it being easy to make work aesthetically pleasing. I used Dreamweaver to put the website online, i had not used any web design software before, so i asked people who had experience in the area, and for ease of use they recommended this one. I used it to add links and rollovers, using the slice and hotspot tools. The last part of the project was to design a poster, and as with the website design, i used Photoshop, this is because i wanted to make the poster as visually appealing as possible to draw attention to it, making this program the most suitable.

Website

For the website, i wanted to stick to the same theme as the front cover of my newspaper. I therefore chose to use black and red as my primary colours. Another factor that i wanted to continue onto my website was the fact that most boxes had curved edges.

I began by redesigning my masthead to suit the website, i changed the dimensions, added a menu bar, and a strapline underneath.

I then added the masthead to the top of a black page, i used black as the background as it was one of the main colours used on the front page of the website. I made sure that the masthead was not so big that i did not have enough space underneath it to include a decent amount of content, and that it was not so small that it was hard to read.

I chose to use white boxes for my articles to go on so that they stood out against the black background, I began by using four of the same sized boxes with curved edges.

However, this left a large gap at the bottom which looked strange. After referring back to my research, i noted that on newspaper websites there is normally one main article with a number of smaller ones beneath it. I therefore deleted the boxes and added other ones in a less symmetrical style.

It was hard to know whether this would look professional or not at this stage, so i added pictures. I made sure that the pictures fitted to the curved edges of the boxes, i did this by inserting the pictures into the shape as opposed to just placing them over the shapes. The first picture i used was one of a holiday that i went on to Ayia Napa, the second was of a friends band playing a gig in Jersey, the third was of empty glasses and a cigarette box at a pub, the fourth box had two album covers which were copyright free, and the fifth box had a picture of a friends football match.

I chose not to fit the pictures in the bottom right box to the curved edges, this is because they are square album covers, and if i wanted them to fit perfectly they would take up a lot of space, making it harder to fit a decent amount of text in the box. I then added text and headlines to the boxes.

There was still space in the boxes so i added text saying 'Click here for the full article', this is where the links would be to the full articles.

Now that my front page of my website was completed, i began working on the second page. I used the same background and masthead as the first page. However, instead of using a number of smaller boxes, i just used one large one.

I then added pictures to the page, at first i was just using one picture. However, i found that if i wanted the picture to be nearly at the edges of the box, it took up to much space vertically, i therefore chose to use two images, placing them horizontally.

The pictures that i used were taken in a holiday in Ayia Napa.

At first this looked slightly odd, i therefore added text to the picture so i could decide whether to keep the design the same.

I decided to keep the design the same, as when the text was added it looked much better.

I then opened up the pages in dreamweaver.

For the website i wanted to make rollovers on the menu bar in the masthead. To do this, i used the hotspot tool to highlight what i wanted to change. Then i clicked 'effects' and then swap colour' to change the masthead to one which had a word in a different colour. Below is a picture which shows what happens when the cursor goes over the words 'Sports'.

2nd Page

For the second page of the website, i decided to keep it relatively simple, this is because if i over complicated it, it may seem hard to read and therefore unappealing.

I began by creating a banner to go at the top of the page, i made it quite small so that there was enough room for content below it. In the banner i included the title of the newspaper, the date and the page number.

I decided to have three features on the page. I did not want to just have a white background for each article so i made each of them differ; one with a plain white background, one with a border around it and one with a grey background.

I then added the pictures and headlines to the spaces. The first picture that i added was one that i took of at the Ocean Club in Marbella, and the second was of a friends band performing at the Jersey Live festival. I chose to use a white font for the headline on the grey background because it stood out more than a black font, making it easier to read.

I then added the text, keeping it relatively small so that it did not look unprofessional, however i made sure that the writing was legible. For the writing on the grey background, i used a black font with a white stroke around it, this was so it differed from the headline and making it more interesting.

Now my second page was finished, i was happy with it as it stuck with the same style as the front page, whilst being a lot simpler and easy to read. I chose not to put too many features as it may have seemed clogged up and messy.