Ancillary - Poster

The second ancillary task is to creat a poster advertising my newspaper. Im going to use the programme Macromedia Fireworks to create my poster. I want my poster to be distributed to local people in all of the appropriate areas, so would request it to be availible to pick up by anybody in local newsagents and community areas (a pile near the till of a shop, for example.) This way it will ensure everybody gets a proper look at the advertisement, instead of just having it pasted on some walls or lamposts, which from my own knowledge and experience, I know is not an effective way to advertise. I would howevewant as an extra my poster to be on billboards around the area.

• The first stage is to get the canvas size correct, which turns out to be a lot easier to remember in centimetres; Width = 21cm and height = 29.7 cm.

At first I was going for a standard poster look, title at the top, catchy slogan introducing the new paper with some photographs dotted around the page. However I found it to look so boring and typical so decided to try something else; lay out my poster like that of a newspaper front page; after all that is what it's advertising.

Having typical connotations of a real newspaper will make my audience instantly realise what the poster is advertising and draw their attention. For research I went on Google images and searched newspaper front pages. I noted the typical conntotations:

• Bold headline at the top of the page .
  


• Typical old fashioned font for part of the title; usually the 'Times' or 'Mail.
  


• Minimal colours; text in black on white background with images and advertisements the only source of colour.
  


• Headings in bold fonts
  


• A logo for the newspaper.
  


• One or two pictures to make the page look bright and interesting.

• As my newspaper is called 'The Bedfordshire Times' I decided to have the 'Times' part in an old fashioned font and on a seperate line so that it doesn't look too crowded.
• I also put the word 'Times' in a dark red to make it stand out even more and create a mature and sophisticated colour scheme.

For a logo I used a black outline map of the Bedforshire area as I felt this kind of image best represented the newspaper and what it stands for. Local people will hopefully be familiar with how Bedfordshire looks on a detailed map and therefore recognise the image straight away, meaning my poster will immediatley connect with the reader.

• It is also quite a cool logo, like The Independent which has the well known logo of a bird, this image can now be associated always with my newspaper, it will be familiar to readers and comforting to them.
• This logo is also going to be the main link between all 3 of my tasks, and will be found on the website and newspaper too.

On a real newspaper you usually have the date of the paper in the top right or left corner, so on my poster instead I put the release date of the newspaper.

My heading is bold and large across the top of the page, and it reads: "New newpspaper thrills locals" I wanted the headline to stand out on the poster so that it was the first thing my audience could see.

• The headline involves the readers, they are the locals that I'm talking about, so they will want to know more about what the headline is implying.

• The text on the page continues the main headline story, I didn't want to write too much as to bore the readers, so kept it brief and in a reasonably large font.
• The paragraph explains further about the new paper and what it will contain. I have used bold font and coloured font in some places to make particular parts of the text stand out.
• For my image on the page - I only chose to have one image on the page because I didn't want the page to look too cluttered and in this one case thought the text more important than the images (the text is informing what the poster is about, whereas the image

is just to back up the fact that this newspaper is local as hopefully some will recognise the picture) - I took a picture of Dunstable's (reasonably) new theatre district that I thought looked attractive and showed one of Dunstable's nicest attractions.

• A friend and I took other pictures of Dunstable that day; more of the theatre district, and other attractions like the clock tower, Bennets Wreck, and the Quadrant. However I thought that this was the most attractive, and therefore used the online programme Picnik to edit the colours and contrast to make the picture even brighter and sharper.
• I placed it in a typical newspaper place on the page, on the right hand side directly under the heading, with a caption underneath just to inform anybody who wasn't aware what the picture was of.

As the idea for my poster is for it to be available to be picked up and taken away by locals (similar to a leaflet) aswell as being displayed on public billboards, I came up with the idea of having a cut out voucher on the page. This attractive offer that simply requires the person to fill out their details on the back on the voucher and hand it in to their local participating newsagent. The offer is for ten percent off local businesses, this could be ranging from

local supermarkets to butchers,clothes stores and many more. The offer will encourage local shopping and bring the community retail success which will please everybody. People are always looking for deals and offers, particuarly in the current financial state of the country.

• I put the voucher in a rounded square shape that I filled with the same deep red as the 'Times' part of the title to continue on the mature colour theme and not make the page colours clash and look tacky.
• I outlined the shape with the dash markers to make it look like a realistic voucher that you really can cut out. I ensured the words '10% OFF' were in large capital font, bold and underlined.

My completed poster:

- Please note that blogger does not let the images get much bigger than this, I have tried to make it as large as possible but it just gets more and more blurry! My real life poster is much clearer and sharper than the image shown here.