About the Newspaper

I am Sarah Cousins and this is the blog for following my Professional Practice module and work experiences.  At this time, I do not know exactly what direction I want to go with my work so having varied experiences will be helpful.

In the Newspaper module, I teamed up with three other friends to create a publication which we decided to do on the topic of comic festivals. We needed 4 single pages each so our publication is 16 pages overall. My pages were about True Believers Comic Festival, Upcoming events, How to Make a Zine and the About the Authors.  I want to make my pages look as professional as I can with my limited design experience. To do this, I looked at examples of existing newspapers and played around with layout multiple times.

From looking at the module guide, I know that I need to research existing publications and relevant media, develop my ideas, understand my working practices and standards, create a complete publication, and show what skills I have achieved through this.

To research publications, I looked at current published examples such as newspapers, magazines and editorials, as well as online for typography and written articles similar to the subject of our newspaper. To develop ideas, I showed preliminary sketches of the page layouts and developed them to the finalized designs, changing layout and process where appropriate.

Working practices will come from the group work, although we did not have specific roles, we assigned ourselves our four independent pages plus extra tasks such as design board creation, digital compilation and finally printing, paper cutting, trimming and folding jobs at the end. At the end of the module we have created a complete newspaper and by doing so, I have furthered my skills in risograph printing, creating a book layout using photoshop, communication of ideas and collaboration.