Studio Brief 3 - Newspaper Research

NORTH SEA OIL FIELD DISCOVERED.

For the study task I got put into Group 10, whose article was "North sea oil field discovered". At first I was worried that this was going to be a very boring article, just to do with economics. But, upon initial research we found this to be quite a controversial article because it had very strong links with the Scottish referendum. The Scottish National Party claimed that the No campaigners had kept this discovery hidden so they could say that Scotland would not survive purely on the oil fields that were found. This caused the SNP to call for an apology from the no campaign, yet they are still remaining silent. 

However, it's not all controversy, this find also means that it will generate more jobs for people in the UK and in Scotland to extract the oil and it will also be very beneficial to our wounded economy. 

So after reading articles from different sources such as The Scotsman, The Guardian, The Daily Mail etc. we got straight into research of what articles about oil generally look like. 

We found 2 very contrasting articles about oil and created a grid to compare them. The first was an article in the Sun:

This is a very simple grid as you can see there isn't much text at all, it is mostly taken up by the image. Although it is an article about fuel prices I thought that it might still be relevant to the subject of 'oil'

Then we looked at an example from the Times:

It immediately strikes you as having much more information on the subject than the sun with a much more complex grid system. There are differences due to this being the front page and the Sun's being a single page spread but I still think that this says a lot about the difference in the newspapers which is down to their target audiences. 

In the end, we decided as a group that instead of mimicking a current newspaper or tabloid we wanted to create our own contemporary version. We decided we wanted to base this newspaper on simple aesthetics and neutrality (no bias) to differ ourselves from the other newspapers. We were very much inspired by Matt Willey's work and the use of his bold, yet condensed typefaces that dominate the page.

We also decided to include a black and white photo in our article, similar to how Willey has just to make the design pop, and not just be columns of text with nothing to break it up. 

This was our initial idea, to have a dominating title, in black, being bold and imposing and taking up a bit of the second page as well as all of the first page. 

I had an idea to combine a drip of oil in the title design, lining up the i's in oil and discovered to pool into a puddle below, representing the sheer amount of oil that we as a country rely on.

I experimented with different versions of this, including have a continuous line of the oil drip. However, others in my group didn't agree with my idea and wanted to keep it simple so we stuck to just text. 

We decided in the end that simple was best, similar to how Matt Willey presents his articles we wanted a bold, simple title that dominates the page. At first we decided on a 3 column grid system, as this was what we had designed when hand rendering our design, however the article that we had put together was much longer than we had anticipated so it turned into a 4 column grid. I am really happy at how the finished product has turned out and I believe that we worked well as a team, with half of us split into research and hand rendered designs, while the other half got on with the digital copy.

Our final design.