Final Crit presentation boards

Open publication - Free publishing - More crackin

Moving on - towards resolving the brief.

It's been a few days since we've been fully active on this brief, largely due to a CTS deadline that needed meeting. Now that's out the way, we can fully concentrate on getting some decent presentation boards ready to submit to YCN on Friday.

To get things clear, we are continuing with our two main ideas that we have been developing;

- weekly pull-out student newspaper section
- newspaper vending machines, placed at various locations around university campuses

As we have a fairly clear idea of how the newspaper vending machines will look, we are mainly focussing on developing the pull-out section of the newspaper.

I've been messing around with a few sketches and put together a few layouts that are intended to aesthetically look similar to the rest of the newspaper whilst clearly being a section in its own right.

With regards to colour, we looked at the existing colour schemes used by the newspaper and selected a colour that we feel would enable the student section to appear as a section in its own right whilst not being too ostentatious (if that's the right word).

Here's how they are shaping up:

Obviously at this point in time it is only a framework, placeholder text etc; but we will try and fill as many gaps as possible in order to make it as professional-looking as it can be in the time we have.

crit feedback

Some feedback from our crit. We got some decent ideas back, mainly;

- a potential screen on the vending machine displaying headlines.
- a larger sports section, as this of course is a big part of uni life for a lot of students.
- potential vouchers etc.
- alternative locations for vending machine placement, train stations etc.

final crit presentation boards

Presentation boards for our final crit before submission next week. We based it largely on the original crit boards we designed, but obviously aimed to make them a bit more professional and effective. It was kind of a rushed job so I don't feel as though they are at all complete yet, but by the time we go to submit them next week they should be looking good. A few notable issues included the lack of our names/contact details, a proper brief title as such, and the fact that it is portrait and not landscape - landscape proves to be a much more effective format, as it works well for both screen and print viewing.

Open publication - Free publishing - More fefew grggsdv

Student pull-out concept

Quick mind map for potential content for the weekly student pull-out section. Some of it got cut off on the right unfortunately, just the graduate section bit and the twitter bit. I reckon it would easily be possible to generate enough content to fill 8 pages or so, which would be a neat little weekly addition to the paper at a very small extra cost.

It could also contain student-geared adverts to generate further revenue for i whilst being relevant to the audience.

Slight change in plan.

The whole time we've sort of slightly been discussing ideas about maybe have a student pull-out-mini-magazine type thing that would feature once a week, potentially on a Friday or Saturday. Yaf recently had a quick chat with one of his housemates, who is a student at Leeds University, who said that he liked the idea of having part of a newspaper that students could pull out and have a read. 

Me and Yaf had a quick discussion this morning to follow this up and think about some general ideas. At a basic level we were thinking that it could be a few page section that would perhaps feature an article from a different institution each week, as well as regular features. 

The individual institutions could decide a topic and nominate a writer, who could then submit an article to print. This would give individual institutions an opportunity to have a national voice and opinion on something, and could help form some kind of integral debate between universities over hot topics and current issues. 

This is the basic idea as such, and will need quite a bit of investigation if it is to be communicated successfully. On the plus side, it gives us the opportunity to mess around with layout design and type-based things, which we like quite a bit. 

Another poster idea

Another quick idea I had for the poster, though I'm not sure it's as effective as the others yet. This time the key features of the newspaper (hopefully) draw your eyes down towards the words 'Essential Daily Quality' and the price. Not sure about it yet though.