In this blog I will explain and document my process of creating a newspaper for uni. This newspaper will make up 60% of my grade for AD5000 Professional Practice.
I have decided to base my newspaper on cats. Cats are something I have always been passionate about without fail, and they are a very popular subject. This makes it easier for me to create and find content, and maintain interest in the project.
I'm not sure what to call my newspaper yet, but I'm sure I will come up with a name as it develops.
I realise this newspaper needs to regard the art industry, so i will be making it about cats within he art industry. (Artists who love cats, famous cat art, etc)
As a starting point, I am going to look for some cat-related artists to research. I need to make sure they're both visually stimulating, but also unique.
Other content ideas:
- Page of my own work
- Cat drawing tutorials
- Fur texture tutorials
- Horitomo - Monmon Cats
- Samantha Whitten - GaMERCaT (Web comic)
- Kanata Konami - Chi's Sweet Home (Japanese anime)
- Idess - Mweor? (An online cat sim)
I started making my newspaper very close the the deadline, so i couldn’t spend a lot of time on the design process. I needed to work quickly and efficiently, getting as much content as I needed and keeping the newspaper design basic and smart.
I also did this newspaper by myself, when it was meant to be a group project. This is why I have less content than I would have liked.
Page one - Front Cover
I wasn’t entirely sure on what I wanted to call my newspaper at first. So I started of with it being called ‘Just Cats, Man’. Which I enjoyed. However it did feel a bit too casual and laid back. I would have liked my newspaper to be casual and a bit funny, but as the creation process went on, it just wasn’t working out that way. So I changed it to something a bit more obvious ‘Cats in the Art Industry’. If I had more time I would’ve come up with a better name, for sure.
For the little cat silhouette, I found a font on dafont.com called Cats vs Dogs LT by Jane, aka ladytimeless. This font consists purely of dog and cat silhouettes and gave ,e a good selection of poses to choose from.
I made the background a soft pink, because, well, I liked it. I did not have time to create a visual masterpiece of my front cover, so I kept it nice and simple so I could focus on the rest of the content.
Page two - Contents Page
This is where I would have put a contents page. I did have plans to do so once I’d finished creating the rest of the content, however I was so rushed and stressed by the end of things that I completely forgot! This bothers me because I now feel like there’s something missing from my newspaper and it also means it has an odd number of pages, making the layout a bit off.
Page three - About the Author
I decided it would be easiest to get the ball rolling by talking a little bit about myself. Not that I believe it to be particularly interesting, but because many magazines have a little ‘about the author’ section and I thought it would be a good place to show a little bit of my art.
Admittedly, I did not have much art to show. I didn’t want to give myself a double-page spread, so I took two cat related pieces of mine and squeezed them in to the one page. I kept the writing short and sweet, as I soon discovered that a little bit of writing goes a long way on these pages.
After fiddling with the page layout a bit and moving everything around a lot, I was happy with the way that it looked. I made sure the use the same font and colour scheme throughout my newspaper also. Including the cat silhouettes.
Page four - Word Search!
I noticed a lot of my class mates had added little game pages including crosswords, spot-the-differences, and word searches. So i wanted to create one too! I created my word search by using an online word search generator (link in my bibliography), and then copying it down onto paper in my own style and scanning it into Photoshop. I changed the colour to match the colour scheme of my newspaper and then added it into InDesign and adding a title to the page. I used a word search generator rather than jumbling the words around myself in order to save time, and to ensure it was a decent quality word search. i did not really trust myself to make it decent.
Pages five and six - Horitomo Artist Spotlight
Horitomo is an artist I discovered while conducting research for the project. A very happy find indeed! I fell in love with his work, so it was easy for me to write a bit about him and create an entire double page spread on his work. Again, I keep the writing part short and sweet, as I was going for more of a visual newspaper. However, as a write this I realise that I could have added some contact information and web addresses in there, and the same goes for my other artist spotlights in the newspaper. In hindsight, that would’ve been a good addition to each page… *sigh*.
Pages seven and eight - Naomi Powell Artist Spotlight
Naomi is a third year student on my course. It was suggested to me by my tutor that I talk to her about her work, as she likes to draw lots of cats also.
Naomi was very helpful and happy to be featured in my newspaper. She gave me lots of her work to scan in and include, and we talked a bit about her work. It was nice to be able to ask her directly what her thoughts were on cats and why she liked to draw them so much. Luckily, she gave me a piece of work with her contact information on it, so I did include contact information for at least one of my artists!
Looking again at this page I have noticed a rather embarrassing typo. I’ve accidentally described Naomi as a ‘passionate lover’ rather than a ‘passionate cat lover’. Oops!
Pages nine and ten - Jenni Desmond Artist Spotlight
Jenni is my final artist spotlight of the newspaper. I found out about her work when one of my tutors gave me her book to look at, ‘Red Cat Blue Cat’. I fell in love with this book as I read it and felt it would go perfectly with my newspaper. It was also good to get a page on children’s books, as this is something an illustration student tends to learn about.
Page eleven - Word Search Answers
I couldn’t put a word search in my newspaper and not give the answers at the end, could I? Funny, while creating the answers page, I had to solve the word search, myself. And it was only whilst doing so that i realised I’d drawn it up wrong. I spent a good ten minutes looking for the word YARN, and this is when I realised that I had accidentally written a V rather than a Y. So I was staring at the word VARN for a while before thinking ‘that must be wrong’. Luckily it was an easy fix in photoshop, and I replaced the word search page with the updated word search.
To create the answers page, I simply solved my word search, and copy and pasted some low opacity pink squares over each letter in order to highlight the answers.
Page twelve - Back Cover
My back cover is blank! This is due to my lack of time, and lack of brain power to even think of what to write on the back of my magazine. I could have gotten some joke reviews and star ratings from my classmates. (Back at it again with the hindsight). But it is too late now. Yes, it would have been good to have something on my back page, but I don’t think it looks too bad without. I kept it with the overall theme and I think it still looks nice and smart.
Fundraising and Print
No fundraising was required for my newspaper, as most importantly, I did not have time, but also i was happy to pay for anything needed out of my own pocket.
As for print, myself and my tutor decided to go for the cheapest paper option, and the quickest method of printing. (A standard printer.) This way I saved time and money, and if my newspaper were to go into production, it would have saved time and money and the distribution would have been quick and easy.
Evaluation
Overall, my newspaper certainly could have been better. However, I am pleased with how it turned out, as I was expecting it to be a lot worse. I am grateful for all of the feedback I received from my tutor, as I would not have come up with half of the content by myself.
To begin with, I forgot that my newspaper needed to relate to the art industry, so I did just make it about cats. Luckily my arty brain incorporated some art-related cat stuff too anyway, but upon showing my tutor, I had a lot of changes to make and content to add.
Luckily, it was easy enough, and it didn’t take me too long to get all of the content that I needed. Of course, if I did have more time I would’ve liked for my newspaper to have been bigger. If I had worked in a group like most of my classmates did, we could’ve made a very good looking newspaper.
Bibliography
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