Creating the Newspaper Front Cover

To begin with I started to look at local newspapers and how they are set out.
It became apparent that the masthead is normally placed in the top left hand corner, like so.
After initially naming the paper and creating a masthead, I edited it appropriately for the newspaper, adding the issue date and price underneath, with a tag line.
I decided I wanted the paper to be issued monthly as there may not be enough news for that particular target audience to be updated daily or weekly, and being a monthly paper can ensure a good copy with plenty of information is produced.
Students also may not want to spend the money buying a paper everyday, and it makes the issue available for a longer period of time.





I then started to create stories and adverts for my paper. I again thought about the target audience and what sort of adverts they would like to see, and decided to put a small advert box stretching underneath the masthead. I created an advert in Photoshop and moved it into Indesign once I was happy with it.

Once placed underneath the masthead, it looked like this.



I had spent some time thinking of realistic stories I could use for my paper, backed up by images I could take myself. I decided to use a story about a new campus being built for the local University, and to take pictures of a local derelict car park to justify it. After trying many layouts I finalised with this one.

I used the headline in white font on a black background to make it stand out, and then underneath the picture a smaller sub headline to further grasp the readers attention. I also used an inserted text box of a different colour, made to be eye catching. In this I used a quote from the story given by a reliable source.

Under this along the bottom of the page, a small amount of space needed to be filled. I looked at newspapers I have at home, and noticed this is normally filled by adverts or earpieces to entice the reader. Local newspapers often encourage readers to share their local stories and information, so I decided to create an advert for this, and another for a local hairdressers.

There was also the long column of space running down the right side of the paper still empty. I decided to create an advert for a clinic to fill the top right corner. I wanted to use an advert in the earpiece as this is a good place for readers to notice an advertisement or story lead. For this advert along with the other adverts, I can re edit them and use them for the newspapers website.

Along with other adverts and a small side story I created to fill space, my cover started to look like this-

 I then used a story about a student winning an art competition and used a photo of my friends art coursework to create a sub story on the front cover.I started to evaluate my piece at this late stage, and decided it was missing something every newspaper has, a bottom footer, normally with the name, website name and page number on it.


I decided to add this, and this would be the same for numbering all the following pages.

Continuing in evaluating my paper, I realised that the name of the newspapers website is no where to be seen on the paper, so I needed to add this. The website name is normally shown just under the masthead on the front page, so I went back and edited my masthead to incorporate the site address.