Dressing up the Agate page

I basically copied the Oklahoman's agate page many moons ago and stuck with it when I redid our agate page, but again, that was many moons ago.

Nowadays we put agate on sport-specific pages (i.e. NFL, NBA/NHL combo, high school, etc.) and use the scoreboard as a catch-all for everything else.

Speaking of fonts, it helps to use a sans-serif font other than plain-jane Helvetica. Your paper may have such a font specified in its design.

 

If you're meticulous about getting things lined up (read: tab stops and macros) and have a clean font, you really don't need to break up an agate page with art/rails/etc., IMHO.

The biggest thing, again, is not taking the easy way out and letting AP format your agate. They don't do a real good job of that.

 

We're talking some about our agate page as part of our pending redesign and the design consultant – not a bad guy, but still – would like to see us get more agate off the scoreboard page and into sport specific packages.

I can see some of that ... but I can also see that approach leaving a lot more pages floating around as deadline approaches.

We run a column of briefs and on lighter local agate days we'll run a story (usually wire, NBA roundup this time of year) about 3 1/2 inches deep at the top of the page.

 

I can see breaking agate off onto another page for some things, such as baseball. But a little of that really, really goes a long way. You've got to be sure that somebody's there to say "enough" when people start thinking of things like running every high school football summary along with its roundup blurb.

I've lived that. That was a long season.

 

All fine ideas, but all can be labor-intensive. When doing redesigns, be cautious that you aren't creating all kinds of new work for yourself.

 

You could always throw in a quick QA feature like this to break up the sea of gray:

http://www.examiner.com/sports-profile-in-national/biofile-interview-with-fernando-rodney

 

Horse Racing Results, what's your favorite local posting?

- What's your favorite breakfast cereal?
- Favorite newspaper to be published in?
- Box score you most like being neighbors with?
- Greatest trifecta?

Thanks. can I get a photo?

 

I design 2 full color pages of stats per day and 4 during the hockey season (I'm from CANADA !) with schedule, results, standings, leaders, individual player stats, summaries, etc.
During the night, we received all our AGATES ready to be placed from a provider, embedding our style sheets. I just drag and drop them on Indesign.
National AGATES are mandatory and our cust. service receives a lot of calls if they are not in

A part of that, I select various local agates among the ones we received to fill the gaps and break the monotony.

 

I guess we're kind of the opposite. Our locals are the must-runs. If anything's going, it will be national.

 

We've actually discussed going in an opposite direction. Until now, we've tried to break up the agate (keeping baseball boxes, NBA, NHL summaries separate from the golf scores, NASCAR lineup, etc ...). That means, we typically have some agate on 2, some on 3 and some on 4. But now we're talking about dumping it all on one page to try to free up our other pages. I can't tell yet if I like the idea or not.

 

You need at least some elements of one, although I could some small dailies or weeklies getting away without one.

If you choose to go the route of running related agate with your stories, it can sometimes make for clutter, or provide design difficulties. And some agate -- daily schedule, agate for which you don't have a story to go with -- has to land somewhere.

One of our department's goals is to cover as much as we can given our space, either with copy or with agate.

 

Not quite sure what "Agate galaga" means, myself.