Painful Learning Experience

I learned a lot about newspapers from this project. There is much more thought that goes into design than I had previously thought there was.
The stories that I chose were the Tate expansion, UGA honeybees, AIDS on campus, and job search. I chose these because they seemed to be the most newsworthy and relevant to UGA students.
Before designing my front page, I looked at other newspapers such as the Red and Black to see what layouts worked and which didn’t. I also looked at the AJC online to see how they credited their stories and photos.
Although I had great examples to go by, I still did not find this assignment easy. I am technologically challenged, and will not forget the day I cursed out loud in class over this assignment. I’m sure those of you who sit near me won’t forget that moment either.
It was difficult for me to place photos, to text-wrap, and even come up with headlines to accompany stories. I felt like I was the only one who didn’t understand the program, and I didn’t want to annoy everyone with my thousands of questions.
As previously said, I’m not the best with computers, so when I compare my front page to the front pages of others I feel slightly embarrassed. I did not think to use pull quotes or reefers. I did, however, keep my front page clean and orderly with the use of lines that separated my stories from each other. I also made sure that the placement of the stories was varied so that the paper looked interesting.
I’m not sure that I would buy my newspaper if I saw it in a store, but at least I made it through the project.
All in all, I’d say that this design project was as painful as having teeth pulled, but the other day when I went to design the front page of a magazine for a class project I sure was glad I knew a thing or two about InDesign.

Designing the Grady Requirement

It's no secret that I had a passionate hate for In Design while putting together my front page.

Having never worked with the program, and already being incompetent in computer skills, I knew I would be in for hours of painful clicking, dragging and deleting (accompanied by many curse words.)

Begrudgingly, I must admit I did learn how to use In Design somewhat sufficiently when lab was over last Wednesday. I might have even liked it.

Nevertheless, critiquing my front page in 400 words or less is going to be a little tricky.

First of all, I am pretty sure I used zero news judgment for my stories. I knew I wanted images that deserved space, even if the stories were not front page material. In my defense I'll say I was trying to focus on the design.

I wanted a simple and clean masthead that would allow space I needed for stories, but also allow a small space for a simple teaser, as seen by the turtle picture. On account of crappy photoshopping skills, my little Grady logo sits awkwardly in the upper right hand corner. Looking back, I would have moved it to the left and switched the teaser to the right to anchor the page a bit more.

In my opinion, it's hard to have a paper without a reefer. I didn't want to present a huge block of text on my front page, I ran the weather, a few promos and an index down the left side of the page. I definitely HAD to have a tornado graphic, so I hit up GOOGLE, and found the one I used for the weather. I would have loved to do something more graphically and standard with the reefer, but I had neither time nor the skills to make myself happy.

As far as modules go, I would not have used both L shaped modules because I feel like the page looks so uniform because of it. However, I was going for ease and that's what I got.

Redesigning this, I would have ran an image-less news worthy article at the top, centered a feature story with photo below it, stuck another story down the right side, and have another story with a smaller image for the bottom. However, I would need at least 3 more labs to redesign this so I think I'm out of luck for now.

I did learn a lot, but certainly not enough to ever, ever, want to do this again, especially on a daily basis. I feel like I am not even good enough for my hometown newspaper, The Brunswick News, which is probably why they refused to hire me last summer.