Task 8Produce a front cover for a tabloid newspaper, based on your written work for your broadsheet article from the Writing Copy unit. You should use your existing text and source appropriate imagery to support it.

You will need to edit your text to change the tone of your written work and make it suitable for the audience. You should show your working here. You will also need to decide what text will appear on the front cover and what would appear inside the newspaper.

You should produce flat plans prior to starting your production work. You should gather a range of suitable images. You should test and decide on appropriate font choices.

Page size should be 280mm x 430mm. Resolution should be 300 pixels per inch.

You should use your knowledge gained from different page layout tasks along with your understanding of the target audience to create the page layout.

You should take lots of screen shots during production to show how you have constructed your page and made your design decisions.

The Sun and The Daily Mirror newspapers are the hottest tabloids around. I have taken front covers of these newspapers to use as guidelines for my layout for my tabloid story. Lots of different information is included on a tabloid front cover therefore I need to take into consideration what aspects such as adverts and other stories I am going to include on mine. The layout is the most important thing about the tabloid cover therefore I need to be careful in how I approach this task and try and make it look as professional as possible. I will do this by using the grids and guides on the program In Design. They will help me place parts of the article and other information such as the master head and the headline into place neatly.

Master head

Advertisement

Headline

Image

Article

This is where I started to produce my tabloid front cover using the program In Design. I came to the decision that I was going to use ‘The sun’ master head and taken into consideration what aspects need to be applied on the newspaper if it was going to be ‘The sun’. In the first photograph I had tested out with an advert at first. I decided that it was taking too much of the page up and it didn’t look very professional when I looked back on previous tabloid newspapers so I took the advertisement out and decided to keep it with just the photograph and the heading. I included an advertisement just above the master head ‘50% off Alton towers voucher available inside, valid until June 2015’. This is something that could draw the audience in to buying the newspaper. Using advertisement on a front cover is good to gain readers as well as keep attracting existing ones due to the demands and high popularity of different newspapers its difficult to keep the figures.

Here is my finished tabloid front cover. I have added two other stories at the bottom of the page as I realised I had a large majority of space left after I had included all the important information that I needed to present my story. I came up with a witty name for the story ‘Drugs are for thugs’ which relates to my article very well and is funny and biased. It is similar to the typical quote used by many people who are against drugs ‘drugs are for mugs’. I have included 50/50 as a play on words also. It has connotations towards 50 cent and also gives off to the reader that you can be half good and half bad (taking drugs). This again helps emphasise what the story is about.

The two stories underneath have no relevance to anything else on the page what so ever. This makes not only the audience be attracted into reading this newspaper but it allows a wider audience to want to buy it and read the different stories inside the newspaper. In a way it doesn’t work as using the queen and a family on the same page as drugs can be offence.

On the top of the page I have included the issue number on the left hand corner. I have also included the date of the newspaper with the day, month and year. Underneath this using a different alignment on in design I have also stated that there will be a voucher included within the newspaper. This is another way of attracting the reader into purchasing.

I have decided to play around with the layout of my design see what I can do with it and see how I can make it better. I have taken ‘50’50’ out of the page as I feel that it was not important and that it was taking up too much of the page. Instead I moved the start of the story underneath the photograph of 50 cent and only used a small width column for this. Instead of the two stories that I had first used, I decided that only one was needed and changed it so it related to the story that is the main object.

I used my personal knowledge of previous news stories that have had a massive impact on the public. I have used Lindsey lohan and her drug story on the front page quoting something that her drug dealer has said about her. I have included a photograph of some cocaine underneath this quote to make it have a larger impact on the reader.