The St. Cleve Chronicle
The Deadline for the Headline is the Breadline
Recreating the Thick as a Brick album cover as a web page shall be fun. The gatefold consisted of a twelve page spoof of a newspaper with an overtly complicated tabloid page layout and —what is more— being a mock of a parochial newspaper it contained deliberate errata, misprints, repetitions, and was overall, badly designed using e.g. six or seven different fonts just on the front page, underlined headlines, and complete disregard for consistency; not to talk about the actual content.
The original text was written by Ian Anderson, Jeffrey Hammond, John Evan, and
Roy Elridge from Chrysalis with additional collaboration from other Jethro
Tull members. I don’t intend to reproduce an exact copy but to try new
concepts as I learn them. There will be also a facsimile branch in which
I’ll strive to obtain a verbatim copy if time allows it.
This excercise in layout originated as part of Brian Holt’s excellent web development course at Frontend Masters.
Main changes
TODO Add a section menu somewhere
I’ll add some sort of menu or nav bar as per the excersice guidelines while trying to keep the printed-on-paper look at the same time.
Rearrange the Layout
In accordance to the excercise guidelines, I use Flex. Grid will surely be implemented at some later point.
Minimize the Use of Fonts
- Headlines
- use Roboto Condensed bold
- The masthead
- is typeset with Old English Text MT and will fallback to Chomsky.
- “& Linwell Advertiser”
- is typeset with Script MT. I am currently looking for a free substitute fallback font.
All headlines are capitalized
No rules
Except for the double rule at the end of the masthead.
Style
I removed full stops from acronyms. Eg. “U.F.O.” changes to ”UFO”.
Sources
I used to own the local (Argentinean) vinyl press which didn’t include the newspaper but I’ve also got the 25th Anniversary Edition CD remaster wich features a scaled-down but nevertheless full reproduction of the original twelve page tabloid.