I was first asked to design a
personalised newspaper front page for a friend's wedding in 2000. Eight years on I have written and designed hundreds.
I decided at an early age that if I wasn't going to make it as a professional footballer I would become a journalist. My football manger decided around the same time that I would never become a professional footballer so from the age of eight I would regularly pen imaginery stories about my football team winning the European Cup . . . 25 years later I am doing this for a living.
Ironically, my best mate used to take the mickey out of me for making up these match reports and now he is the one making up stories on the sports desk of Britain's best-selling newspaper.
I studied journalism at Napier University in Edinburgh and after graduating and working for a couple of local newspapers I landed a job as a sports sub editor on the Sunday Mail before moving to the Scottish Sun where I would stay for more than 10 years, spending the last two as chief sub editor.
That first
personalised newspaper front page I was asked to do was for two graphic designer friends who were getting married in May 2000. 'A DESIGN FOR LIFE' is still one of my favourite headlines.
From there I was regularly asked to knock together
newspaper front pages for
birthday gifts and
wedding gifts. It is also a newspaper tradition to give a front page to a colleague who moves on to pastures new.
My colleagues at The Sun soon got fed up with me constantly asking for their help designing the front pages so a friend and I decided to set up our own business and
Scooped! was born.
He has since left to become political reporter for the Mail on Sunday but I decided to stick it out on my own.
It has been a long and winding road to get to where we are now and there has been a lot of trial and error, with the emphasis on error.
I recognised the huge potential of
Scooped! early on and last year I decided to quit my steady job as chief sub-editor of the Scottish Sun to make it the success it is quickly becoming.
Our website has been recently re-designed and we are adding new templates on a daily basis. We offer six different template styles -
The Scoop (red-top tabloid style)
The Daily Scoop (middle-market tabloid style)
ScoopSport (tabloid sports section)
SCOOP! (celebrity magazine style)
ScoopStunner (glamour girl style) and
ScoopStud (glamour style for men)
We can write and design a
personalised newspaper or
personalised magazine front page for any occasion and to date we have templates for the following ....
personalised adult gifts;
personalised birthday gifts;
personalised Christmas gifts;
personalised Driving Test gifts;
personalised engagement gifts;
personalised Father's Day gifts;
personalised football gifts;
personalised graduation gifts;
personalised hen night gifts;
personalised Mother's Day gifts;
personalised music gifts;
personalised newborn baby gifts;
personalised retirement gifts;
personalised stag night gifts;
personalised Valentine's Day gifts;
personalised wedding gifts and
personalised work leaving do gifts.
In our brilliant
ScoopSport pages, you can 'sign' for your favourite sports team, be named their 'No1 fan' or even 'buy' the club.
And in our sensational showbiz specials you can join your favourite pop or rock band.
Our photoshop experts can also superimpose a head on to a glamour model - to make you a
ScoopStunner or
ScoopStud.
Scooped! is going from strength to strength and we work closely with other gift sites as well as football clubs in the Premier League and Coca-Cola Championship in England and the SPL in Scotland.
There are other companies in the UK who sell personalised newspapers but
none of them have the experience of working in national newspapers (in some cases, any newspaper) - and it shows in their product.
They operate a one size fits all policy, leaving huge white spaces on each page and, bizarrely they add a series of exclamation marks for emphasis.
This would never be acceptable in a real newspaper - so it is not acceptable on
Scooped! pages.
Our emphasis is on quality, not just quantity, and our news desk will often interview the customer to personalised their page further.
No two
Scooped! front pages are the same, ensuring a gift that is never forgotten.
So if you want to buy a
personalised newspaper or
magazine front page gift then stick with the experts, stick with
Scooped!
