Week 11

First mock-ups playing around with colour and composition.
Further experiments with colour and layout, use of white space and small/large text. Also looking at how the colour backgrounds on pages could be altered. The cream has been inspired from The New York Times newspaper image, and I have chosen green for its connotations with the environment.

This is where I realised I wanted to explore DW News (Germany) instead of NYT in New York. As I was using my colour scheme based on that; I have changed up the design. (I have explained my choice for switching the third article in my website research previously).

  • I have incorporated statistics into my design and created frames around images and text to create ‘blocks’ from newspaper influences
  • I don’t think it was clear enough what the blue lines meant, so as the original graph was in German I have added the English equivalent % and type of insect
  • I really liked the images of insects on the original chart – there is a lot of text based elements on my page so I wanted to use more images – I have placed in the white space to break up sections
  • I have also tidied up the framing as that was messy. I have chosen to move my text and article snapshots to the left, allowing the statistics on the right to breathe.

Final design:

I have created a folded newspaper mock-up to represent the three articles that I explored in week 11. I have compared and contrasted the articles and provided the examples of headlines in my article so the readers can see the original website typography used (i.e. sans-serif or serif). I have tried to match my 500 words (in columns) to the images I have used – they support my thesis.

Feedback from Sarah in webinar:

Sarah said to be mindful of the edges which I completely agreed with, and therefore I have created a mock-up of the final outcome with a border:

The border really helps to give the layout to breathe and visually, some white space with the contrasting text and image makes the overall composition much more appropriate visually. I consciously chose to keep the blue border on the right side going right to the edge as I felt that worked. Going forward I will be mindful of working close to the edge of documents as these can get cut off by printers too.

How could I further develop my work?

I would look at simplifying the article – taking away elements that I ultimately don’t need. Do I need the images of insects as well as the text of insects? Probably not. I would look at removing one or the other and see how I could create more breathing space.
I would also consider an outcome where there is an example newspaper of each country I explored – but designed in what a ‘minimal’ version would look like (just like my outcome above). I think that’s an interesting thing to think about, and would display all of the newspaper creating skills I learnt from this week.

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