OUGD403 Newspaper Layout (Study Task Three)

For this task, we were divided into groups and were given a specific title from an article that was in the news that week. My group was given the title "Oscar Pistorius begins jail sentence". I think this was a really interesting topic to create a newspaper spread for, as there was multiple opinions within our group about the verdict and we had a debate about whether we thought the sentence was long enough.

To begin our design, we decided we will look into newspaper spreads that already exist about the trial. Below are the ones that I found. I think they are all very basic layouts, which is obviously needed for a newspaper as they are informative, so there needs to be a lot of text. We decided as a group, however, that we didn't want to stick to the basic newspaper layout in the traditional sense.

To begin our layout for our newspaper, we decided we would start drawing some basic layouts. These are below. I think they are really successful in the use of columns, however we have decided as a group that we are going to use an 8 column grid for our article. 

We researched into the trial and also the crime and discovered multiple interesting facts about case, such as there was 4 bullet holes in the bathroom door and also many quite gory pictures of the crime scene had been released. We decided we would focus on the gun used, which was a 9mm pistol. We used that as the outline for our text box and created the layout below, which is the finished product. Below is the final piece with grids and also without. I think this task was really successful as we only had a short amount of time, so our research had to stay concise and relevant.

As a group, we presented this to another group in a crit. They said the layout of the double page spread was definitely successful. They questioned why we used the specific grid, and the main reason was that we wanted an 8 column grid, and the gun looked best when it was split up with the grid, as the gun without the grid made the type not stand out as much. They also asked which way the spread should be read, but we made it so the information made sense whichever way it was read, as each paragraph is mainly a fact about the court case.