Design: fun but cumbersome

My experience using InDesign over the course of our labs was rewarding to me. I've been writing for The Red & Black since I was a freshman, but I had never seen how the paper was designed, let alone tried my own hand at it. I found newspaper page design to be a lot like a puzzle: it's unquestionably fun and rewarding once you get the ball rolling and get a firm grasp on how InDesign works, but it was tedious and frustrating at first. We were also given minimal instructions on exactly how to work the program to make our design look professional, so I pretty much had to learn on the fly.

In the end, I was pleased with how my design turned out. Although most people weren't in favor of the "Christmas" colors in the logo, green is my favorite color (also a color I rarely see in newspaper design), and I had chosen the green typeset prior to adding in the image of the red-bordered Grady logo.

As far as laying out the actual front page, the only actual goal I kept in mind was that, out of the four articles I needed to include on the front page, I wanted to vary the setup of each. I browsed around the front page gallery on Newseum and discovered a variety of interesting layout design choices. I eventually chose to model mine after a smaller-scale newspaper based in California (the name of which escapes me at the moment), running a vertical one-column article down one side, then stacking the remaining three in an unobtrusive, smooth fashion. I thought the large center photo of the biking students, coupled with a smaller photo near the bottom, helped the overall aesthetic design of the page.

Using rules and photo borders was a small tweak, but it did wonders: these simple lines transformed my page from clutter into a professional(ish) and coherent end result. The headlines and cutlines were surprisingly easy to write. One thing that has always bothered me with The Red & Black, for example, is that sometimes the headlines don't even appear to reflect the actual content of the story -- I often question if the people writing the headlines at the paper even bother reading the stories at all. As such, I made sure I carefully read each article and understood the central point of what it was trying to say before writing any of the headlines or cutlines.

A few things I wish I had been able to incorporate are some of the less obvious journalistic design elements: teasers in the masthead, a reefer of one of the stories, and a table of contents of sorts to scroll along the bottom.

I thought my inside page wound up looking fairly atrocious. Perhaps this was because I had more time to spend on my front page, but I found the inside page to be more difficult to put together. Compared to my front page, where I found myself carefully allocating what little space I had, my inside page suffered from the dilemma of too much white space. For me, this was mainly due to only pulling from two articles. There was far more space than the articles demanded, even when including pictures, and forced me to think of what else to fill the space with (ads, pull quotes, etc.). However, in the interest of finishing on time, I wound up going with an entirely horizontal, text-heavy (and frankly quite unremarkable) layout.