Jacques Derrida: (The law of genre, 1981): 'a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without... a genre.'
With this in mind, I ensured that I create a masthead that conformed to some of the generic conventions of local newspapers however I realised very early on that I would have to break certain conventions mainly because the conventions set are for an elderly audience where as my newspaper is set for the youth.
INSPIRATION
I decided to use this template as a guideline for my nameplate. It involves a blocked nameplate, clipped images which links to the contents of the article and an authentic nameplate. What strikes me as interesting in this template is the fact that is in a different shape. This is because of the technology that newspapers have had to work with over the years. Traditionally nameplates were composed of nothing more than typography, which in the English language, runs horizontally from left to right. It’s becoming more common for newspapers to experiment with different nameplate configurations.
As my target audience are young teenagers and with my local newspaper being completely new, I decided to make my nameplate similar to this template. Teenagers of today know a lot more about modern technology than any other age group; thus using this template is likely to appeal to them because it involves using softwares which they may be familiar with using at schools, colleges, even university's. Secondly, it stands out from the conventions of nameplates in local newspapers thus it is bound to attract not only my audience but people in general.
WAT DID I DO?
1) I created two layers:
Layer 0
Layer One
Layer 0/ Background
I created a textbox with the abbreviation of the London Youth Times (LYT) in different fonts and colours in lots of words. An example is below:
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The fonts I used for this draft are:
Roosewood Std
Stencil
Street Writer
Sydnie
Layer One: I created a box and filled it with black paint using the paint toolbox. I then used a stencil tool called Vertical Type Masked Tool. An example is below:
Altogether it looked like this:
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I decided to practice the new skills I learnt and make more drafts this time with my nameplate. These are below:
Upon feedback from presenting my ideas I was told that these templates look like logos and not nameplates. It became apparent that in order for my target audience to know about my newspaper I needed to create a nameplate as well as a logo. I created these instead:
DRAFT ONE:
I used the same layers as my other draft however I replaced the stencil with normal text. I decided to represent my target
audience by using a specific font (Street Writer) for the word 'youth'.
The words 'London' and 'Times' are both Impact font.
- This again breaks the conventions of nameplates used for local newspapers as the same font are normally used for all the words used in a nameplate however I decided to give one of them a personality.
- This I believe will attract my target audience because they will be able to identify with that font; it looks like graffiti and graffiti is easily recognised by everyone. However, it is mostly associated with teenagers as they are seen to be the ones who 'abuse it' the most.
- The only negative aspect of using this font however is that it conforms to the stereotypical view that teenagers are 'hooligans'. Graffiti is seen as a way vandalising property however I'm looking at the fact that its a form of art and I believe that my readers will see it that way too.
Final Template- I showed Draft 1 to members of my target audience and they thought that the colours used were too dark.
- I therefore changed the colour of layer one to a lighter shade of grey.
- I also changed the colour of the word 'Times' to green.
- I went back to the same members of my target audience and they thought that it was much better; in fact they liked the colours chosen because it meant that it would stand out a lot more from the local newspapers of today
- To show which Borough the newspaper is for, a member of my target audience suggested that I place the name of the borough at the right hand side of the nameplate using the font Street Writer
