The Robins is Swindon Town Football Club's own newspaper. I created the publication for match spectators to read either pre-match or at half-time. It aims to spread news about the club and community surrounding it. Free to spectators, a new newspaper is printed every match so season ticket holders have something new to read every week.
The tabloid is made up of underlying grids, varying between 8 and 12 columns. This allowed for a complex design that makes use of the entire page, whilst being able to include deliberate white space in places for some room to breathe. Swindon Town's colour, red, is used throughout to ensure the newspaper had visual links to the club, without plastering the badge over it. This brings a level of sophistication which is appropriate for this type of publication.
Example of hard news spread in The Robins
The brief
The proposed printed newspaper had to include a feature article, examples of handling hard and soft news, listings, infographics, front page headline news, and distinct middle and back page treatment. This brought a number of both micro-typographic and macro-typographic challenges. However after numerous rounds of iteration and experimentation, suitable decisions were made so all text is legible and readable.
Template
As part of this project, I had to create a working InDesign template with detailed specifications of all aspects of the newspaper, including every level of heading and paragraph style, pull quotes, captions and image credits. This taught me to be extremely specific with how I use and present my InDesign document, making use of lots of available tools on the software to ease the process.
See below for the newspaper design.