Comission: Layout and Design

For the layout and design of our newspaper, i read through a few different examples, but mainly focused on The Guardian for our project. The newspaper is very consistant with its layouts.

 The text layout is set into 5 collumns, which continues through the paper, and images are placed onto the pages, with the text working around the images within these columns. Also, there are alot of page break lines used to seperate different stories on pages, as each page usually contains 2 or 3 stories.

In the design, the paper comes up with around 20 different page layouts, and then reuses them throughout the paper with different stories and images. Depending on the seriousness of the story, the size of the image changes. More important stories have more space allocated to them, between 3 and 4 collumns wide, where as smaller stories have images between 2-1 collumns. Even with the larger stories, there is usually a relating side story which is found in the side column.

Using this research, i started to come up with a rough idea for the layouts for our newspaper:

I came up with 6 different layout possibilities. These were just rough sketches, so i didnt stick to a certain number of collumns for text, but i think for our newspaper, 4 collumns will be enough. As we dont have a large number of stories to work with, there would be no need to put in small side stories around the photos, thus giving the oppertunity to print the images larger, and giving space for the more important stories we wish to feature.

After making these 6 designs, i decided to get a real idea of how these would look layed out in a news paper. To do this, i made a half scale newspaper, and started to plan out the layouts page by page. The scale model included the 15mm border around each of the pages, and started to give an idea of spacing between images and text, and how they would relate to eachother within a story.

These are some scans of the first 3 pages, showing the layout and positioning of texts.