Evaluation

I was asked to create a local newspaper for my main task and also a website and a poster to go along with my newspaper. I researched current local newspapers and found two of the most popular papers in my local area. These were The New Shopper and The Bromley Times, these two newspapers were both free and distributed locally in the Bromley borough. I chose to use some of the basic conventions that both these newspapers possessed such as having a distinctive colour behind the name of the newspaper title or under the title as shown here:

My newspaper is the first one shown and as you can see it follows the conventions of the other free, local newspapers. Also I noticed whilst doing my research was that the fonts used for the title of the newspaper were all san-serif fonts and therefore I also chose a san-serif font for the title of my newspaper.Another convention I noticed whilst researching was the fact that the picture on the front of the paper usually had nothing to do with the headline, I found this very interesting but upon further research I discovered that the picture was meant to draw you in by being glamorous whilst the headline was meant to shock you and make you want to read more about it. Another thing I noticed was that sometimes the newspaper would use an image and a headline that, when combined, really shock the audience. A great example (see below) is when the headline is talking about a murder and the picture was of a happy family with a young girl. Upon further reading of the paper you find out that the two have nothing to do with each other it’s just a clever tactic to get the audience to want to read on. Here are some examples where the headline and picture have no relevance:

As you can see here the picture is of a happy family with a young girl whilst the headline is about a shocking murder. The clever use of both of these stories makes the reader want to pick up and read the paper. Another example is here:

As you can see the headline is about elections but the picture is about a car show. So by looking at these conventions I decided to make my headline and picture completely irrelevant as shown here:

Whilst doing my newspaper I also had to look at the conventions of the websites that were attached to the newspapers and I found some conventions that they followed that I also included in my own website. Some of the conventions was the fact that they had the same logo they had on their newspaper and also the colour they used behind the logo was also the predominant colour of the website as shown here:

As you can see here the same logo for the newspaper title is the same as on their website. To keep with this trend I also used the same logo for both my newspaper and website so as to keep an air of familiarity between the two. Another convention was the addition of a search bar for quick and easy navigation around the site. I thought that I would also add one to my own website so as it was more user friendly because from my feedback I discovered that easy navigation was crucial to a websites success. I also decided to add a

real time digital clock to my website, I thought that this would be useful as it also shows the date so that you can see how recent the news that you are reading is.I also noticed that most of the websites all had a white background, now I for one don’t think that white web pages look particularly interesting so I decided to use the same green that we used behind our newspaper title for the background. I thought that the connection between the colour and our newspaper would be re-enforced and also the addition of colour made the website look less plain. So in this instance I decided to challenge the conventions of newspaper websites.Another convention I noticed was the fact that there was a navigation bar at the top of each website just under the title. Now I learned from last year whilst doing my charity campaign website that a navigation bar was a crucial element of any good website so myself and Georgina also added a navigation bar to our website to allow for easier navigation of my website.I also followed the convention of having multiple articles on the front page to allow the user to pick and choose what article they want to read and not to limit them to reading the article that I think might be most interesting to them. So I chose to show a selection of articles that would interest a wide range of audiences. I chose to do this because I wanted to appeal to a wide range of people so by having stories about sport, music, technology ect.. on the front page it would hopefully appeal to a wider range of people.

Me and Georgina were also asked to do another ancillary task that was to create a poster to go along with my newspaper. I found this one the hardest task to do because I have never seen a poster advertising a newspaper before so I had to do some serious research so as to find some convention to follow whilst constructing my poster. After much research the only posters I could find were the ones on the sides of buses as shown here

for the Sun newspaper:

So I had to use a combination of both these types of posters and posters for films to create my own poster. I followed certain conventions of these types of posters such as having the same title and logo that I used on my newspaper so as to make a connection between the two. I also decided to use the same colour scheme that was on my newspaper as the one on the poster. I noticed that the predominant colour on the bus adverts was the colour that was associated with the newspaper ( Blue for Bromley Times, Red for the Sun ect..) so my poster had a green background that was the same colour as the one used behind our logo on our newspaper. We noticed from both types of posters that there wasn’t much info on display and the main aim of the poster was to get your interest with pretty pictures and exciting words that would want to make you go out and find out more about what the poster was advertising. So we decided to keep the words to a minimal on the poster and only show the most important information (e.g. the fact that our paper was free) and we also used a picture of a new gold iPod that we were giving away in a prize draw. So like the poster above we were portraying the best features of our newspaper to get the audience interested.

Throughout our designing of all three of our tasks we were set the task of linking them all together to create one big advertisement almost. So myself and Georgina did this by using the same colour scheme throughout all three of the tasks so that people could associate the green we used as something to do with our newspaper. This is a very successful tactic as when you think of red and a newspaper the first thing that comes to your mind is the Sun and also the colour orange and a shop Sainsbury’s is the first to jump to your mind. So we decided to make all our pieces of work include the green we used as the predominant colour. We also wanted to make a direct link between our three tasks and we did this by advertising our website whilst doing our poster. We also used an iPod on the front of our newspaper and again used a different coloured one on our poster so again we are linking the three tasks together. Also on our website we decided to include some of the stories that were found on our front page so that people could get the same information whether via the web or via reading the paper. Myself and Georgina also decided to keep with the same target audience whilst designing both our poster, website and newspaper so that we weren’t appealing to a different audience through different media. We did this by keeping with the same language and way of writing so that whichever task our audience looked at it was familiar and still interesting to them. We found though audience feedback that there was a clear connection between our ancillary tasks and our newspaper due to the use of colour scheme, writing style and the addition of mentioning the other tasks whilst reading another one.

Myself and Georgina learned a lot from our audience feedback when you showed our 3 tasks to them. We learned most of all that our audience wanted a simple and easy to use website rather than it being too flashy and they also wanted to be able to find the story they are looking for quickly as well. So going on this information I decided to add a search bar into out website that would allow them to search via keyword any article that they wanted to read. Also me and Georgina also decided to keep everything very neat on the front page so as not to confuse our audience so we decided to add a navigation bar across the top and have everything in sub-sections under these separate links so as not to overwhelm the audience with too much information crammed into one page. Also by going on our audience feedback of not wanting the website to be too flashy we decided not to use too much html coding and flash player parts to our website so that the audience felt comfortable in how to navigate around our page and not get lost in all this ostentatious ways of displaying stuff. Another point that came up when designing our website is that the audience wanted it to run on every computer because it is annoying when you have to get an update just to allow a certain part of the website to work but your computer doesn’t have the right software or hardware to allow you to use it, also if you have lots of flash script running then it takes longer for the website to load. So myself and Georgina decided it was better to have a website that was available to everyone and was quick to load than have a ultra flamboyant website that took ages to

load and only the best computers could view it properly.

Whilst showing our audience our newspaper we discovered that they wanted a story on the front that didn’t completely finish so that the rest of the story was on the inside, this would then encourage them to pick up and read the whole paper. Also they didn’t want too many stories on the front page and they wanted them to be about issues that would affect them. So myself and Georgina took notice of this and decided to keep the stories on the front page to a maximum of two and both stories were carried on inside the paper. Going on what our audience said about them wanting these stories to be about stuff that is affecting them we made one of the two stories about knife crime, now being that our newspaper is aimed towards older teenagers we thought this issues would appeal to them as most stabbings these days are committed by and against older teenagers, so we thought that this issue would strike close to home with our audience. Also the other story we talked about on the front page was about the iPod. Now because most teenagers are into technology and everyone has heard about the iPod and almost everyone owns one these days (or at least some form of music player) we thought that this issue again would interest our target audience.

Upon showing or audience our second page we leaned that they wanted to know about stuff that was happening around them that they could attend (such as a gig or a football match) or get involved with (such as a poll). Also an easy to read weather forecast of the local area for the rest of the week was a must have. So after listening to the feedback me and Georgina went away and decided to write an article about a local band who were playing in the area that our target audience may be interested in going to. The band we interviewed were of the same age group as our target audience so we thought that this would strike an instant connection between the two. And our second article was about the

Glades shopping centre, we chose to use the Glades because it is one of Bromley’s main attractions and also everyone in the local area has most likely been there to shop. Now because our paper was being distributed in Bromley we thought that it would be something that our target audience could communicate with. The article we wrote was asking the audience about whether they thought the Christmas decorations were being out up too early. By doing this we were getting the audience involved and we asked them their opinion, again furthering their involvement in the newspaper.

Our last task to show our audience was our poster design to promote our newspaper. Our first attempt at our newspaper was messy and cramped, we tried to give too much information to the audience and used many different colours to try and catch their attention. But after listening to our audience feedback we learned that a more minimalistic approach would be better and it would seem more professional and it was easy to see the information that was important. So we decided to use less colours and only show the information that was really important. We also chose to change the background colour from the original black because our audience feedback showed us that black didn’t stand out enough and made some of the information hard to read. So we decided to change it to the colour of our newspaper and our website. But we also added a gradient to it to make it look more stylish. We also used the iPod from our website on our poster because our audience thought that if we made the link between the two then it would show that the poster is legitimate. This is what me and Georgina ended up with:

During my course in media I was able to use a multitude of different software and hardware to complete all of my tasks. Before I started media I had never really used any graphic software (such as Photoshop, InDesign, Final cut and iWeb) but during my course I was able to use these software packages to advance my work. I used Photoshop to manipulate images and make them look more professional. A great example of this can be seen in our poster above. At first we took a photo of Georgina’s iPod using a DSLR (another piece of hardware I had never used before) and then put it on the computer. I then took the photo into Photoshop and then proceeded to delete the background so we could put it onto any background and make it look like part of it. I then changed the colour of the iPod (which was originally blue) to gold so that it would look more appealing to the audience and also so that we could make the iPod look like a limited edition iPod to fit our prize offer. To create our website I used the iWeb software as it was specifically designed to create web pages. I started with a blank page and then created boxes and inserted images into the page to create my homepage. I was then able to create a new page and link the old page to it via a hyperlink. I was also able to link pictures and words to other pages using hyperlinks so that the user could click on the picture they wanted and then be taken to another page. Also for our website I was able to add a html encoded clock into it so that it used the internet or the computers internal clock to give you the correct time and date continuously (rather than having to refresh the page to get the time and date accurate. Another software I used during my course was InDesign. I used this software to create our newspaper as it allowed me to add grids and columns to make it look more like a newspaper. I was also able to add pictures and captions to the newspapers again making it look more like a real newspaper. All of these softwares were used during the production phase of my work but the software I used during my evaluation stage was Blogger. Blogger is an online blog site that allows you to upload images and text and even video to the site and allows other users to access it and leave comments and replies to your work. I found this an invaluable tool whilst doing my evaluation because it also allowed me to read other people comments on the stuff I uploaded and then change and edit my work based around their comments. Another online software I used was Slide Share which allows you to upload large text documents and then the software makes it into a slide show of sorts to make it look more aesthetically pleasing to the audience. So through the combination of these two online softwares I was able to show and present my audience in a professional and easy to access way. So all in all I used a culmination of different media software to help create, develop and present all of my work. And through integrating the different software I was able to produce work that looks both professional and easy to use.