Design thread .... v.2

Send me a PM. I'll talk you through it. It's pretty easy.

 

Thank you. That's what I was trying to get at. This has turned into a "let's critique one guy's pages" thread. The old thread when someone would just post a random page and people would talk about it was a lot more interesting.

I say if you want your work critiqued, start a new thread and post them on there. Lets turn this thread back to the way the old one was.

 

Here's one for you guys. Tell me what you think about this page. I've only been doing design for about six months now and am just looking for some criticism. As you can probably tell, this is a small town newspaper and we focus heavily on local prep sports. Anyway, have at it.

Also, after looking at it, I just noticed how different the column widths are on each story. How bad is this and what suggestions can you give me to correct this in the future? Thanks

 

No, the veto was the lead story. Pretty easy to tell from the front. And one thing to keep in mind: The lead story (especially when it's politics) on many, if not most, News fronts often doesn't have any kind of art you can CP. The setup on that page (CP and lead are different but both are prominent) is common on news pages. From a CP-as-lead standpoint, Sports has it much easier because there are many more good photos to choose from. For instance, if you've got a feature, a preview and two gamers on a Sports front, you likely have a wide range of photos to choose from for each. Depending on the importance of each, you can basically choose your CP/lead. However, it's next to impossible to run a lead political story (national and local) as a CP because the pictures, if there are any, are weak. Usually just people standing around podiums. The options are 1) to make the lead the lead (as a strip or in two columns) and CP according to art (hopefully decent to good local art), or 2) build a CP for 1A, which can be done from time to time, but not daily. That kind of stuff is usually saved for Sunday 1A CPs.

 

I think you're off to a fairly good start here. And don't worry about the varying column widths; I hate pages with five stories of 12-pica measure. I think you should mix it up to make the stories look different in shape.

Good centerpiece.

My biggest problem would be in some of the story packages themselves. Three of your multi-column stories have what appears to be the same size, same font of headline ... and nothing else to grab the reader. They look rather uninviting, even the lower left story which has a photo hooked to it. Your top story, especially, needs more than that 3-column, 30-point single line.

You need to take those stories and add read-ins (like with the centerpiece), or info boxes, or something to prevent everything under the headline from being a mass of gray. Do you have more than one font option for your headlines? If you do, by all means use it for variety.

 

Speaking of gray.....I was told once that you shouldn't be able to lay a dollar bill onto the page without it hitting an added element (photo, info box, teaser box, mug shot, team logo, etc...).

Not too worried about my covers, but I'm almost afraid to apply this test to many of my inside pages. Thoughts?

 

I think that sounds like a pretty good rule of thumb, Willie, but there are going to be times your hands are tied on inside pages.

Grab those front-page victories.

 

Just to keep things going with sports pages for a change ... here's one I did a while back. It's a double-truck in the tabloid section.

 

Shotty, those look like portraits as the main art. Correct?

If so, I'm impressed.

 

I hear ya, Shotty. Every year, no matter what, my biggest weakness is inside pages. Try as I might, there's always plenty of room for improvement.

I like the doubletruck. A lot. It's easy to follow and you didn't screw it up with a bunch of cutouts. I maybe would have made the "Big 11 Girls Softball" a little bigger. Other than that, solid effort.

 

It would have been better with some HELMETS!

 

That's live action art; just worked well in the page design.