Study task one-Message and delivery Research (OUGD403)

Our study task was to get into groups, each group was given a current story in the news. We had to do some research into the story, choose a target audience and create a layout for the article according to this. 

We looked at an article about Oscar Pistorius starting his jail sentence as our subject. All the articles we found were packed full of information and direct quotes from members of the family and such. We found the information was a little overwhelming and that we realistically wouldn't personally want to read that much. It was also really badly laid out online and hard to read which didn't help. We decided we wanted our article to be aimed at students like us who didn't want to read that much just wanted a few of the main facts and also make it look interesting and attractive so younger people may be drawn to it. We also wanted to keep a serious tone to the layout though as its not the type of thing we would feel comfortable trying to create a lighthearted feel about.

Above is one of my groups initial idea sketches. We thought the idea of doing a front page could be good as its definately serious enough news to make the headlines. But on the other hand doing a spread would give us more space to work with and we wouldn't have to worry about space for adverts and other stories. The image above shows a very regular mast at the top of the page for the title. Then 4 columns for ease of reading. Then one photo space that conforms to one column and one that fills two. The grid was pretty simple as we didn't know what content we would need on the front page fully. We decided against this as we just wanted to focus on our story. 

This next sketch shows an idea for a double page spread. The title spreads across both pages to clearly show they are linked and the subtitle down the side, this means all the large text is out of the way and not necessarily the main point of focus. The left page has been dedicated to a photo so that the overall spread is quite minimal and not an overhaul of body text, if could even bleed onto the right page a little. The right page is dedicated to 3 columns of text, all the information is in one place to keep it from being confusing. 

This page spread once again was based on the idea we wanted it to be attractively minimal and not too much text so students and younger audiences would want to read it. There is a huge space on the left dedicated to the title so it really stands out and grabs you but we wouldn't want to use an unclassy font we would have to choose something attractive and simple and not too condensed to you kept the flow of white space. Below is space of text split up into 5 columns so theres room for quite a lot of information but doesn't take up too much room and look overwhelming. Once again the other page is dedicated to an image, this large image would draw in a reader and make the writing look less daunting. 

Lastly we had the idea to go with a title spreading across the double page spread and use a basic four by four grid system on each page. We wanted to incorporate image throughout the article and use it to break up the text so it didn't look like a huge block. We looked at some images we could include for this.

We looked at this crime scene image of the bullet holes which I think is a really good photo and would fit well for one of the more simple layouts.

And images like this which we thought were a bit too gory for a newspaper and would be too hard to break up throughout a spread. 

We then reexamined the research we had done into the story and found out the type of gun he used was a 9mm hand gun. We found an image of the gun on a plain white background and thought if we could use the gutters of the grid to break up the image and maybe fill certain parts with text it could look really interesting and definitely appeal to the target audience as it would be quite playful without taking away the serious tone. We decided to make the photo of the gun halftone, to create a minimal look and to reduce printing costs as most student newspapers need to be cheap. Also we made sure it was monochrome as we thought it was fittingly serious looking. Instead of drawing out the grid we went into a digital idea.

This image above shows the final layout with the Indesign grids and textboxes still applied. We started with a simple 4x4 grid with the gun image behind and made the gutters and margins filled white to split our image. We then took away parts of the image and inserted text keeping important parts so you could still see it was a gun. Some text filled two columns and other filled just one. We used a condensed, tall sans serif font called Bureau Grotesque as looking at it we felt the tallness kind of had a feel of prison bars and it was bold and striking perfect for our title and also the quote. We decided on times roman for the body text as although our layout wasn't very typical of a newspaper we wanted a more typical newspaper style body text and as times was designed specifically for that purpose it seemed perfect. We also filled one of the squares with a photo of Oscar at the trial giving it all a little more context. We also decided to right align the text this decision came about when creating the top left piece of text as it fit to the grid better that way. Its also fitting to the anarchist and want to be different attitude of students and young people these days so rather than conforming to the usual left aligned text this brought a whole different feel to it.

This is the final layout we came up with. We put a quote in the corner from the dead ladies mother. When changing the leading of this we noticed by happy coincidence it looked really effective and stood out more when highlighted so recreated this effect with the black boxes behind. Overall I think the interesting a symmetrical layout looks really interesting and inviting and is something I would be drawn to reading. We made sure we broke up the text in a way that it was still read left to right going down each page so although it was dotted around it could be read with fluidity. The vast amount of white space between everything is really nice and balanced by the grid we used as our starting point. Although I have now noticed the columns only have 4ish words per line which isn't perfect but apart from that I really like it.

I decided to make the flow of the text better I could reduce my pt size so there was more words on each line. In the image above I reduced it from 12pt to 10pt and it looked better but filed less space in each box and there still wasn't 7 words to a line. 

So I reduced it again to 8pt, this meant there was now a good amount of words per line and I could also add more content. When looking on screen im not sure which design is most effective the 10pt or 8pt so I would like to do a printed test to compare.