Day 4 was the design sprints prototype day. This involved taking our plans and realising them in the form of a physical prototype, which we will crit on monday. We took yesterdays mockup and digitised the front cover, basically using the mock up design in its entirety. We needed to work at high efficiency today so the outcome is rough but the important thing is that we get a working prototype. We had to quickly establish a typographical style and layout that we could drop content into, at the same time pulling articles off the internet for the content. This content was sourced to suit the different sections of the paper.
Today felt very rushed, as it was, the difficultly was disregarding style and beautiful design in return for a finished prototype in under 5 hours. The massive advantage of this is that we can not crit the finished product, and become informed to a higher degree as to what people would like to see in a newspaper.
The front page is an amalgamation of the sketched out design and a typed up lead story. Our idea to create two distinct sections for easy reading while the paper is folded generates a strange split personality to the cover. This is probably also down to the conflicting styles, huge header and use of crude illustration with photography and type. We also had a time problem with this page as it was re-worked at the last minute. As a result the grid may have been broken.
This is our digital prototype/ proof for the use of quickly copying content into the indesign document. It also showcases the typefaces we used, with Founders Grotesk for the uppercase page title and article titles. For the articles leading paragraph we used PT Sans and for the body copy; Century schoolbook. We think that these typefaces have a certain synergy and were inspired by the usage of both serifs and sans serifs in modern conventional newspapers.
We used an 18 column grid for the base layout and formatting of the publication, we then used standard three column layout over the top for the use of the bulk of our content.
The baseline grid is used to format the line spacings, set to 2mm spacings. This allowed us to level off all the text properly on the horizontal plane.
Close up of the grid. This illustrates how the grid accommodates different sizes of text, allowing for multiple point sizes whilst retaining a ridged structure.
Another addition has been the pullout quotes. The main application of this device is to fill blank space on the page, helping to flesh out articles and square them off. We wen't for this cut back style because we were aware that a very visual version could be too similar to one of that found in a magazine.
Inside the publication we kept to a basic three column layout within the 18 column grid. Because this task was completed so fast you may notice that we accidentally shaved of one off these on the media pages right hand side. This is an occupational error of working so fast, which will be rectafied when we go on to refine the whole paper. On this dps we also added some mock spaces for advertisements. In the next working version these can be fleshes out into more suitable examples but here they are very simple jokes and a black square, just to denote space allocated.
The final addition to the paper is its last page. Here we added a preview of what will be in next weeks news. There could be a satire here on the fact that it impossible to predict the news, unless of course it is manufactured. Then again the topics listed are very general, Obama is added to Mt.Rushmore. The UK storm is not really a storm. These are relatively timeless concepts. Another addition that can be seen here is the image overlay text. This is explored elsewhere in the paper, it is essentially used to label the image in a bold and headline crunching way. In practice it works on the back page but on every other is is too overbearing agains the much smaller headlines.
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