Final Newspaper

Production costs

Our production costs won’t be too expensive because we have decided to print our papers in house, and so won’t have to pay for a company to print it for us.

We are working on these assumed costs:

Paper: £3

Printing credits: £16

Drawing equipment: £5

Creative cloud Adobe: £100

The creative cloud is due to Alex G working on his illustrations at home using Adobe software but this cost technically will not factor in as he was in possession of the program before this publication.

Research for magazine aesthetics

Lightly (2012) inside out magazine Available from: http://www.lightly.com.au/news/post/inside-out-magazine/

SPD (2011) New york: meet inside magazine Available from: http://www.spd.org/student-outreach/2011/03/new-work-meet-inside-magazine.php

 

We researched these magazines as a group, and feel that we would like something of similar taste and style. The colours stand out when used well, and are not overpowering which is what we want to achieve with our newspaper. The tones all work together, which is why we felt our newspaper will work well due to the very limited colour palette. The shapes are an interesting thing but for our particular newspaper, sticking with a block frame outline would be best as we want the illustrations in the paper to stand for themselves, but also do not want the text to be ignored.

Another thing we researched for ideas on the aesthetics of our paper, was previous year’s work. This helped as we were inspired by what people in our same situation had produced. These newspapers were impressive and helped us think more closely at what we wanted to do for our own one.

I also found this slightly pressurizing as their final products were of a high standard and it is what is also expected of our group this year.

Creative review (2012) A good spread. Available from: https://tomlancaster.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/a-good-spread/

Although the clean aesthetic of this publication is refreshing, I found that the layout was too structured as all images were confined into small shapes instead of flowing with the text, I think this made the article look bulky and the illustrations look like some sort of advertisement. 

The inside of the magazine below is much more my style. I found the illustrations to be obscure and interesting, there is a range of materials that have been used. I like that the article looks as if it is there to annotate the illustrations when it is in fact the other way round. There is a large amount of imagery filling the page and as an illustrator I find this more engaging than a page filled with lots of text. However, I would of thought the imagery would be spread out more to fill the page more.

This is the cover from the same magazine. I like the illustration on the front, the use of line is particularly interesting as it is bold and effective. It became more engaging as it seem to surpass expectations of some illustrations, the bubbles go out of the frame work, over layering it. Normally you would expect the image to stay in the area where the space ends. This magazine also stuck to a small colour palette which shows it is a popular choice for publications. 

Varoom (2013) Experiment. Available from: http://www.varoom-mag.com/?p=4857 

Research ghost stories and folk tales

Here you can see a large list of ghost stories and folk tales in which I gathered from several sources so that we could decide which stories we would like to research into. Highlighted in pink are stories I discovered an interest in. 

By making a spider diagram of well known tales made it easier to narrow down the search into those which sounded interesting to us personally, by choosing tales by their name, we then looked them up to see if they were tales in which we would enjoy writing articles about.

Initial Planning

Firstly we discussed which themes we would be interested in exploring in more detail for our newspaper:

·         Animal encyclopedia – This would be perhaps local animals that are native to the Cheltenham area

·         Myths / Legends

·         Ghost sightings / Creature sightings

·         Folk Tales

Personally, my first thought was that doing a theme such as an Animal encyclopedia would only attract nature enthusiasts rather than a larger audience. We then decided to combine the last three topics in the list as it was more of a widespread topic in which we could find a lot of information and research. It was also positive that we all were interested in these topics and were inspired to look into more depth.

Another reason why we decided to continue with these themes was that we have all met people who believe in the paranormal or legends, people such as myself. It is a common occurrence that people are curious as to whether ghosts, ghouls or monsters exist so this offered an opportunity for a larger audience. 

What we had to discuss next was which fonts would be good to use. We had to factor in most importantly whether it was easy to read but also it needed to fit with the aesthetic of our newspaper.

·       Bodoni

·       Blackoak

·       Cooper

·       Courier

·       Chiller

Chiller was the most fitting font for our aesthetic but the trouble we had when we recieved feedback from our tutor was that it may be hard for some readers to make out the text. Courier was a font which was easy to read as it had the style of a typewriter and the other fonts - Bodoni, Blackoak and cooper were easier to read but didn't fit our aesthetic as much as Chiller had.

After choosing fonts we then had to decide on a colour scheme which would support our theme. We chose to pick a small palette of colours to create a sense of consistency in our newspaper as this would bring our individual styles together despite how distinct they all are.

Above is the colour palette which we decided to use, in the beginning the beige/cream colour was a darker brown but after feedback we decided to change it to a lighter colour so that our colour palette would have more contrast, which would then affect our illustrations as well. 

The next main step of our planning was choosing two articles each in which we could create a double spread. 

Design Board

This is a design we made as a group, the two Alex's designed the colour scheme and two images, and I myself, producing the text / ideas. Alex P drew the 'Everyman Theatre' to go in the background as it was a possibility for one of his articles and Alex G drew the crusader knight on the left which he was planning to use for one of his articles also. This copy still includes the darker brown colour, that we later changed to a lighter  cream/beige which was a more contrasting colour.

Below is the image which Alex P created for the background of our design board. 

After discussion we decided we would need to research more publications which looked into our chosen theme. By doing this we found publications such as the ones shown below.

I like the art work shown on the third image 'Weird Tales' - I think that it stands out and the colours complement each other well. 

These three magazine covers incorporate the aesthetic  we are aiming for in our newspaper, spooky but also creepy. Although not actually that frightening. We want the aesthetic to be interesting without putting people off by being genuinely scary. This is why we felt that our illustration styles worked well for this project, we can draw creatures etc without showing too much gore. 

(2013) giants famous monsters magazine (issue 55) Available from: http://www.uncleodiescollectibles.com/html_lib/giants-pub/00020.html

Pulp covers (2016) ghost stories Available from: https://pulpcovers.com/tag/ghoststories/

Download Issues of “Weird Tales” (1923-1954): The Pioneering Pulp Horror Magazine Features Original Stories by Lovecraft, Bradbury & Many More Available from: http://www.openculture.com/2016/06/download-issues-of-the-pioneering-pulp-horror-fantasy-magazine-weird-tales.html

After we had done some more research on publications, we updated our design board by adding the research into the background. 

Group discussion via Facebook (part 1)

Our first step to working as a group began with creating a Facebook chat, in which we could all speak about ideas or post references related to the newspaper project.

Below is notes I have taken to keep track of ideas we have had.

Key:

• Alyssa (Myself)
• Alex Griffin
• Alex Parker

Topic ideas:

Animals or folk tales/monster/ghost stories in and around Cheltenham.

If we can't find any for Cheltenham then we should expand to the UK.

Books found:

Gloucestershire ghost tales and Gloucestershire folk tales both by Anthony Nanson 

Strange tales of Cotswold town

Folk tales and legends of Gloucestershire

Haunted Cheltenham

The Cotswolds ghost stories

Logo ideas:

Ghost/spirit

Father John

We could create seperate headers for our own blogs/articles with a similar design but in our own individual styles.

Fonts:

Chiller, Century Gothic

Bondoni 72

Cooper std, Courier

Colour scheme:

Dark colours like greys, greens and black to fit with our theme.

Blues

Browns

Influences:

Our influences could be authors of books we use as references/artists who have explored our topic or style.