In designing my front page for The Grady Requirement, I spent the majority of my time focusing on the masthead. An eye-catching masthead draws the reader in and makes them want to pick up the newspaper. I designed my masthead by perusing the section containing images of front pages from across the nation on Newseum.com. I chose to take a local angle on the front page of the publication, modeling it, in a sense, after The Red & Black The stories about the donation meters, pet adoption, and the UGA health center all take a distinctly local direction. The article about job seekers would be important on a national basis. However, it also has a local impact in that all college students ultimately want one thing: a job.
Looking back over the front page, I should have definitely cropped the person's leg/foot out of the picture of the donation meter. Additionally, I could have cropped the entire background out of the picture of the donation meter and wrapped text around the meter itself. I chose to center the page around the donation meter story due to the fact that many Athens residents have wondered the whole story surrounding the meters.
I agree with Justin's viewpoint concerning the masthead. I think it's appropriate to spead a generous portion of time of the masthead to make it eye-catching and sophisticated. If your masthead is uniteresing and ordinary, then the assumption is that the rest of your paper may be as well.
ReplyDeleteSo based on this argument, what do we think of the new AJC masthead?
ReplyDeleteIf you haven't seen it:
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=GA_AJC&ref_pge=gal&b_pge=1
It's a little hard to tell what story goes with what picture, and the text of the bottom two stories appears to run together. You used a line to separate the far right story from the others - lines separating the other stories from each other would be terribly helpful I think. Granted, you may have already thought of that and simply ran out of time. Other than that, it looks quite nice.
ReplyDeleteJustin,
ReplyDeleteI think that your masthead is most definitely one of the strengths of your front page. Although I agree with your critique about the meter photo (and wish that the poor puppy dog was looking into the story not off the page), all-in-all I think your page is very well-designed. Thank you for your hard work and good attitude this semester.