Daily Mail cover evaluation

1) The task we were given was to recreate an identical newspaper front cover of the Daily Mail, we had to include a political story and a headline of the royal wedding being called off due to an inside scoop story given especially to the Daily Mail. The target audience was aimed at all as the political story would be aimed at the A-B audience and the royal headline at all due to their hierarchy and due to them being adored by the nation.

2) The research i undertook to find typical conventions of the Daily Mail front cover was to look at different front covers and analyse and evaluate them to understand a pattern in layout and headline styles. I found a typical Daily Mail front cover what have an advert under the mast head and then two headline stories below one with just a picture and the other just with writing. The font they would use for the headline was typically written themselves therefore that could not be recreated however the font for the actual story section of the news story was all typically the same.

3)  I used this Daily Mail front cover to recreate for my own. I chose this one to recreate because it showed clearly two different news stories which i could recreate using a political and the royal wedding one. I also liked the advert banner on this newspaper as its fun and gives room to be creative with it yourself.

4) The areas i found most challenging when recreating this Daily Mail front cover was trying to match the fonts and get the correct spacing. Due to Daily Mail writing their own fonts it would be almost impossible to exactly match it so trying to find ones as similar as possible was a challenge. Also, the spacing between the writing and text proportions were challenging to match and look even due to how much you had to experiment with the text sizing and stretching.

5) My initial feedback for my front cover was that the headline wasn't evenly sized and looked quite stretch and pixilated so i changed it to look as even as possible. I also made the gaps smaller between the lines in the body of the text to make it look as close as possible to the original front cover.

6) I believe my advertisement banner at the top of my front cover went extremely successful, I spent a lot of time on it in order for it to look identical the original which involved a lot of experimenting with fonts, sizes and images. Next time I would create a longer headline to make it easier to recreate the spacing more evenly as then I wouldn't have such a large gap between the headline and body text, it would also allow the sizing of the font on each line to be more equal.

7) From completing this task it has taught me the importance of analysing and how to analyse every part of a newspaper and why elements are placed where they are in order to create effect especially on the audience to draw their attention. It highlighted to me how intricate creating the advertisement banner was in order for it to stand out and look professional. This task also taught me that almost every front cover had two headline stories, one with just an image and one with just text.