Recreation of Daily Mail

1. What was the task you were given and who was your target audience?

Overall, the main task for this was to recreate and form an accurate representation of a typical Daily Mail front cover, from a developing news situation. The target audience was the same as what the newspaper typically has, which is the C1,C2,D audience profile.

 2) What research did you undertake and what did you find were some of the typical conventions of a Daily Mail front cover - layout, types of stories, fonts

There was a high amount of research conducted in order to provide the most accurate representation and recreation. To begin, I decided it was a good idea to actually look at a proper typical cover on the tabloid sheet of paper. Doing this allowed me to get a very good idea of sizing, scaling, image quality, font and paragraph spacings too, as well as a good idea of the sort of conventions and techniques which the Daily Mail use in order to distinguish itself from any other newspapers which may be sitting beside it.

From this kind of research, I was able to build up a standard template of the kind of elements which are going to feature on each newspaper sent out. For example, having a main story, consisting of a very large font, and also having a completely unrelated sub-story (usually celebrity or sports related) alongside a relevant photograph. The newspaper does not feature front-page advertisements, alongside a skyline containing some sort of preview of a coming attraction, offer, or some sort of free magazine.

 3) Which Daily Mail cover did you use as your main source? Insert. What are your observations from this source?

I decided to make use of two front covers to build and develop my final product. The first one allowed me to build and model the ‘second half’ of the front cover, giving me font size ideas, the idea to use a bullet point list, and also the exact dark shade that the sub-story box has been coloured in. The second one was used to aid me in the ‘first half’ of the cover, with the typical Daily Mail logo and offer. For my cover, I decided to use a ‘win a share of £1million’ to add some variation, but retained a similar blue gradient, font and formatting. A high quality Daily Mail logo was used, alongside an accurate date and price. A similar ‘Femail’ magazine area was added into the blank white space was added in, but this time, in a shade of blue which the newspaper has used before to ensure that there was no wasted space on the front cover. All in all, this helped me ensure that I could assemble and build the prefect recreation of the front page.

 4) Which areas did you find most challenging?

Surprisingly, creating the title and actual content for the cover was not the part of the creation process which gave me the most trouble. Instead of this, it was actually choosing which fonts to use, and also creating the exact character spacing to make usage of. For example, I had to create all of the elements and carefully judge the spacing between all of them by eye, as specific information of this wasn’t available. I was also creating the cover originally to the size of a typical tabloid newspaper, but for simplicity, I decided to change it to the standard A3 sizing to aid within printing at school, which affected the whole layout, essentially forcing me to recreate it again.

The formatting, font selection and scaling took the most amount of total time, because I essentially required it to appear perfectly, spending five or six lessons just staring at the cover from a distance and making minor tweaks.

 5) What was you initial feedback? What did others say about your production? How successful was do you think it is?

My initial feedback was largely successful and often involved fellow students being ‘amazed’ at the detail of the work. Teacher feedback drew attention to mostly the resolution and quality of the images which have been made use of, which were promptly corrected and then made the cover look even better than before. Overall, the project was largely a success, winning the main prize within the class.

 6) Identify what went well and with hindsight what you do to improve/do differently.

All in all, I will be considering time in my future tasks. I felt that sometimes, I was wasting quite a lot of valuable time doing the same tasks. I feel as if ‘segmentation’ could help me do this, taking a little bit of time to produce a complete task time plan. I would also consider sticking to this plan, and not deviating away from this. As well as producing a time plan, it could also be of good use to plan a step-by-step list to ensure that I always know what exactly I am doing, and also to help with any initial planning stages I may need to complete.

 7) In the exam you will be analysing newspaper front covers. In producing this cover, are there any areas that you hadn't noticed before? What have you learnt from completing this task?

I feel as if I didn't learn anything which was completely novel to me, however, it did give me a better, and more secure understanding of background knowledge on some existing things I have already learnt in the past, such as conventions with the headline, fonts used and the specific ways that the newspapers choose to capture its audience in and amongst the competition, as well as simply how much effort is placed into creating a new front page every day.