'Rooted' Newspaper
March 2024
This project was part of my third year at university.
The project involved designing a newspaper, including choosing the topic, designing the masthead, creating all of the systems involved in the newspaper, deciding typography styles and typefaces, acquiring content and images for it and building a working template of the design.
I chose to create a newspaper for plant lovers called ‘Rooted’, I used plant-themed aesthetics and visuals alongside the articles surrounding recent plant news, tips for gardeners and houseplant owners and plant top picks for upcoming seasons.
TypefacesBookmania – used for headings throughout the newspaper, long reads and featured articles utilise Bookmania’s extensive range of glyphs to emulate a growing plant aestheticCoranto – designed specifically for news use, I used Coranto for body copyOpen Sans – pairs nicely with Coranto, I’ve used it for captions and pull quotes in the newspaper
Building the layoutThis project primarily surrounded building a functional newspaper layout including the systems involved, while also following conventions in place across other established newspapers.
I started with a tabloid sized newspaper and trialing both 5 column layouts and 4 column layouts as well as both justified and unjustified text.
Long readI began designing a long read for the newspaper surrounding a story found on BBC News. This allowed me to look at hierarchy, use and positioning of imagery and captions, typography and other elements of the newspaper in a functional capacity, deciding how these systems would work on this article and across the newspaper in its entirety.
I ran through a series of iterations on the general layout of the long read.
This newspaper is for plant-lovers and plants themselves are pretty so I wanted to lean into this with the imagery I use.
Main newsAfter building the basis of my layout and systems through the development of the long read article I moved to the main news article to see how my layouts and systems could handle having three to four articles per page.
Here I also tested whether it would be better to differentiate main reads from long reads with justified body copy, I also retried using five columns instead of four as another distinction.
Design systemsAfter developing the long read and the main news I have created systems for most elements of the newspaper including imagery, captions and credits, headings, dividers, etc.
Captions – Utilise a green arrow indication which image they’re in reference to. Captions utilise the chosen sans serif typeface. They appaer around one baseline away from the image and around two baselines away from the main copyPull quotes – These use the feature colour of the newspaper and quote marks that visually function similarly to drop capsImage breakouts – Mostly appearing on long reads some images, where applicable, will have leaves or other elements that break out of the frame of the image to make the imagery more dynamic and ‘alive’Headings – Utilise two major levels of hierarchy for headings depending on importance of article. Long reads and featured articles also use glyphs curly glyphs to symbolise plants and vinesImage credits – Moved to the right of imagery and set in small caps in same typeface as captionsByline and drop caps – Bylines utilise same type setting as body copy and are defined by rules above and below, they also cut into text block’s first column. Drop caps utilise sans typeface in bold and the green feature colour