Thursday 9 July 2009

THE EAST END TIMES

Newspaper Evaluation:

I created my newspaper front page on a program called 'Adobe InDesign', which as far as I'm aware is a popular program for the creation of such things. This was the first time that I had ever used the program but managed to pick up the basic features easily as it appeared to be very similar to another program under the Adobe brand - Photoshop. I had used photoshop previously in my GCSE and AS Level coursework.

The first idea in which I had for the paper is the name - The East End Times. There is no particular reason in why I chose this name, primarily because it is to be sold in the East End of London.

As you can see, the masthead is very conventional in terms of newspapers - large white text engraved into a red background. This is a very fitting look for the paper and I saw this idea from mainstream Newspaper, The Sun, but changed it slightly to fit the style of the newspaper I wanted to create. The font I used is Arial Black (another conventional feature) and included the date and price below, which again, is very conventional.

Below the masthead I included a few adverts which fit round the headline, destroying any 'blank white space' which is unpopular with newspapers. I also included a 20 pence coin to emphasize the cheapness of the paper, and as many newspapers do, overlapped it onto the masthead. I did this by locating the edge's of the image of the coin, and changing the threshold and tolerance until the white space around it had been totally destroyed, and closely overlapped it.

In my opinion, the headline of my newspaper is very effective. I used the font 'Impact' and used the 'stretching' feature to make the text very big and powerful - it will easily draw the attention of anyone who buys a newspaper. The content of the text is also very effective: 'THE END? NO.' What could this possibly be about? This will encourage people to buy the paper as it could be about ANYTHING.

The subheading explains this though: 'Gun crime being tackled? Lies cannot hide truth as another teenager's life becomes a statistic'. Notice how the text 'GUN CRIME' is slightly bigger than the rest of the text, again, to draw attention and to make the two words seem more powerful. I did this by using the 'stretching' feature and the font is also Impact.

Below the heading and subheading is the linking news story and picture. The picture is on the right side of the page to allow the story text to fit nicely around it and as you can see, the majority of the images have a boarder around them, just a nice little feature I added to make the page more aesthetically pleasing.

The aesthetics of the story text are very similar to that of The Sun. The introduction being the font 'Arial Black' and the rest of the story being 'Times New Roman'. Also, another nice feature I added is that occasionally some of the words and phrases in the story are highlighted bold - just to emphasize the important points of the story and to make the words seem much more powerful than they actually are - a basic yet effective feature used in newspapers. The story is also in columns and fits around the image perfectly.

Finally, at the bottom of the page is a statement stating that the paper is printed on 100% recycled paper - just a little something to finish off the page and again to destroy white space. It also makes the newspaper look like they care about the world and its environment - which is a very important issue for a lot of human beings.

To conclude, I am very happy with the final product of my newspaper, it actually looks like a real newspaper! Adobe InDesign is a very user-friendly program and I never felt 'stuck' during creation. I would recommend this program to anyone for making a newspaper/magazine and not Adobe Photoshop - which I used to create my magazine for my GCSE coursework.

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