The Mistic Examiner

Newspaper Design

For a Design Class I was tasked with creating a newspaper. I started the creation of such by looking at both local and national newspapers. I took heavy inspiration from The Hampshire Gazette, a publication in the Pioneer Valley. I wanted to portray fictitious events and decided to apply it to a fictitious town I created a long time a go. I used Mistic, MA as the location of this publication, and so the Mistic Examiner was born.

Due to the high turn-over rate, I had close to a week to create and finish the newspaper. Most of the time was taken by the design of the layout and the stories that were on the newspaper. We did had the option to use placeholder text but I felt it removed layers of creativity that this project can have. Due to it being set in Mistic, a place only shown through renders. It allowed the possibility of incorporation previous assets into the work. The only new render shown in this project is an image of a rotary phone for a New England Bell advertisement.

It is a similar story for the 2D assets, most of them were imported over to Adobe Illustrator from Moho which had been created in the past for other projects. The maps shown in the project had been used for some animations and was edited to show a gradient of colors to represent temperature maps. The advertisements were made on the spot for those areas in the newspaper, while the weather icons were created for the project.

In terms of the information in the newspaper, accurate weather data was collected. The stories presented in the publication were made to reflect a town with tense local politics, its connection with the state of Massachusetts and the neighboring towns. Some of the information presented was edited from their sources to reflect the fictitious world it came from. These include; addresses, phone numbers, and events.