My development: front cover

This is the development of my newspaper front cover and inside page.

This is the initial layout I made for my newspaper. I experimented with the colour red and blue as they are bold eye catching colours. However I decided it didn't suit the newspaper as it didn't reflect a newspaper as well as darker colours would.

At this point I changed the theme colour to a dark yellow. To make the newspaper theme dissimilar to the Yellow Advertiser I knew I would have to make some slight alterations. I moved the Master Head to the far left to leave space for my catch phrase 'Students read something worth while for once' - this is meant to be ironic and humorous. The newspaper was slightly conventional in its format at this point which I knew i would have to move away from as it is a parody newspaper. I made a logo for the newspaper which is a stick man holding books. It is supposed to resemble the students at work:

It is only small next to the title however is effective in emphasising the catch phrase 'read something worth while for once'. The first story i wrote was about a South end pub crawl. I understand that the newspaper is aimed to the whole of Essex so I decided to write about an area that is popular to most Essex students.

I thought at this point in my development it is important to get feedback from my peers and this is what I received:

I received a lot of good feedback that I took into account but I mainly focused on the negatives to try and improve my newspaper. The first main negative comment I received more than once is that I need to add more colour to my newspaper. This is when I decided to change the 'derrs' to red. It makes the newspaper stand out as well as the illusion of the word 'derrs'. I also made the word slanted as well to emphasise onomatopoeia. The next criticism that I received was on the sizing of the elements of my newspaper. My peers thought that the title wasn't big enough and therefore I re sized it. After making a few other slight alterations this was the outcome:

At this point I left two boxes blank on the right column for advertisements or another story. I acknowledged that something was wrong with my newspaper at this point. I felt that it didn't stand out enough and was slightly too formal so before carrying on I decided to gain more feedback but this time instead of gaining feedback from my peers I asked two teachers. This is the feedback that I found most affective :

From my teachers feedback I decided that my newspaper needed drastic changes. This is what I started to do:

I decided to cut out some of the images to give the illusion of the image coming out of the page. It also made my newspaper less formal. I also changed some of the columns to make them less predictable on the page. The main thing I changed was a to create a banner across the top for the top story of the week. I then used the pen tool to cut the man arms out of the cover image. Again this was to remove the formality of the page.

Final newspaper front cover: