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.

Long Live The Grady Requirement!

When brainstorming what I wanted my group's front page to look like, three words came to my mind: newsy, clean and navigable.

Inspired by the AJC’s front page, I set out to pack mine with as much information as possible, which led to the refers above the masthead as well as down the left column. When I look at a front page, I want to be able to skim the important stories and know where to look if I want more information. Newspapers are, after all, papers full of news.

After I gave my page the proper amount of newsiness (yes, I invented that word for this blog), I then set out to make it as clean as possible. So many newspapers, magazines and Websites are too cluttered. When the average reader only spends 20 or so minutes on a newspaper, you want them to spend less of that time deciphering and more of it actually reading. To ensure my front page was clean, I inserted lines to visually separate the main stories, as well as separate the masthead from the rest of the paper.

Lastly, along the same lines as making a clean page, I wanted to also make a navigable page. One online news source that I think does an excellent job of making its site navigable is the Daily Beast. Their use of color and consistency of bold fonts allow the reader’s eye to flow from one story to the next. I tried to similarly make my page navigable by using bold fonts.

As far as news judgment goes, my newsy newspaper had to (of course) cover the university’s budget crisis in its top story. Then, like the Red & Black often does, I thought it would be appropriate to engage my student reader with a feature story about the anniversary of the on-campus streaking incident.

Overall, I really enjoyed putting this front page together. I learned a lot about designing for the reader as well as choosing content for a specific audience.

Design is a humbling experience

My front page for the Grady Requirement is not as well-developed as I would have liked it to be, but I learned a great amount about page design along the way. Since I'm terribly slow at working with InDesign, my goal was to finish the page in the allotted time -- which I barely did.

I will start with a few things I disliked about my page:
The masthead is simple and clean, but fails to stand out as much as some of my classmates' (who, by the way, possess some sort of magical page designing powers). A colorful background would liven up my masthead, in my opinion. Also, I didn't have the time to outline or draw boxes around any of the stories or graphics. This makes the page appear to have too much white space and not enough structure. The Red & Black uses small, dotted lines that are good for boxing stories and graphics. I also caught a bad break with the word "willing" in my pull-quote. My "Athens Today" refer was a bit rushed. I wish I could have made it more visually appealing.



On the other hand, I was happy with how the Tate 2 package turned out. I followed the typical "L" shaped modular layout outlined in Tim Harrower's book, and it fit nicely as a leading story. As a magazines major, I've always been a huge fan of pull-quotes, so I think the quote "boiled down the essence" of how students feel about the environmental features of the Tate expansion project. Also, as you can see, I incorporated a green background to show off my stellar InDesign skills. Overall, I think the module placements are OK, but need to stand out more. The teaser on the masthead works for me, yet I agree with previous blog posts that warned to not overuse teasers. I tried to not overwhelm the front page with too many visuals like this.

My method for choosing stories to appear on the front is similar to many of my classmates. Stories with art and a local perspective worked the best. I chose the Tate article because it's a $58 million project that students pay for and will use in the future. Instead of taking a PR approach, Jason did a nice job of focusing on the eco-friendly aspects, which many students are concerned about. With graduation around the corner, Claire's piece worked great as a centerpiece. Though it reflects an event that occurred Feb. 11, the article addresses students' anxieties in an unpromising job market. Renee's wildlife package caught my attention because not only was the photography excellent, the story highlighted a little-known volunteer group that many students may not know about.

I enjoyed this project, but know I have a lot more to learn about print design before I would ever seriously pursue it in my career.

Front Page Design

When choosing stories for my front page, I strictly went off of whatever stories had images to go with them. I knew I wanted at least 3 images to balance out the gray of writing, and then had to think about a variety of images. No matter how good or bad the stories are, the first thing anyone holding the paper is going to look at are the images, so I felt that it was important to have catchy ones.

I also knew I wanted to try to have some cutouts at the top, so I thought I could do it for the biking story, but I ran out of time. I still managed to get one on there, but I would have liked at least one more.

I didn't really have one paper that I used for inspiration. I feel that I have a pretty good idea of what makes a balanced image, so I browsed through the front pages on the Newseum site, and found that I was drawn to front pages that have large images and bold headlines. However, there were several that had so much information on them that they were messy and overwhelming. I have consistently liked Oakland's front page. They have a tendency to use REALLY large images and very little text. I guess I'm a photo junkie.

I have to say that I had much more fun designing the front page than the inside page. I liked knowing that I could cut stories off whenever I wanted to make them fit the spot I had created. I had no idea how tough it was going to be to edit down someone else's story to make it fit. I felt like a jerk cutting into stories and taking parts out. Needless to say, my inside page was NOT very exciting, because I took out as little as I could from the three long stories I was required to squeeze in.

...and I'm having severe issues uploading my image.

The Blog Requirement

Before we get into my blog post, let me tell you a story. Somehow my final page design was not saved anywhere as a completed design, so below is a scanned copy of the print-out I turned in. I've also included a small section of the impartial design, so you can get a feel for the color.

• • •

For my general design layout, I looked at the Newseum Web site, specifically at the Times Daily from Florence, AL. I'm sure you'll notice the similarities.

I, like some others, spent a good deal of time on my masthead. I happen to be one of those nerds who is captivated by and very picky about fonts. (As it happens, I'm still not completely satisfied with this particular font, but I suppose we have to work with what we have.)

When it came to news judgment for my front page, I picked my top story almost solely based on the quality of the photos available. I am finishing up my photojournalism emphasis, so it can't be helped. However, I did avoid that one photo of the little girl because I noticed everyone was using it.

I eased up on my photo judgment for the streaking story. That's one of those stories that just screams "Front page!" The photos weren't wonderful in quality, but it just had to be there. I also knew I was aiming for four stories on the front page, so I used as little space as possible by cropping down one of the photos from the story and using a pull quote as my only text. But since the package was looking a bit mundane at that point, I threw in some artsy quotation marks in an attempt to create a more interesting space.

For the bottom section of the page, I was aware that we had two pretty similar stories about post-graduation opportunities, so I thought I'd try my hand at a two-story package. It was helpful that I could jump inside as much as I wanted.

The refer box down the left side of the page was an element I got from the Times Daily design, but I left the content until the very end of the design process. Unfortunately, it shows. I had lofty ambitions for this portion of my page, but as the class ended, I let myself get sloppy. Most of the photos were just taken from Google Images. I did try to redeem myself somewhat with the clever "Required Reading" heading. Did it make you chuckle? If so, then I'll consider my mission complete.

Final Blog- my front page

Using InDesign to create my front page was difficult for me to understand at first, as I never had any experience with the software. After some trial and error, and a few teeth-grinding labs (and Amber's ingenious assistance of course :) I was able to greatly improve my InDesign skills. For my front page, I initially had a pretty simple layout, consisting of three stories in a block-style. It looked boring and lacked any creativity whatsoever. So at the last minute, I trashed my first draft and started from scratch. I used newseum to look at many of the front pages from newspapers across the country for some insight. This is where I got the idea to add a large, centered photo, because when looking at the website full of front pages, I noticed that ones with a large center photo usually caught my eye. These front pages I studied also led me to add a mugshot going along with the two teasers in my left column, I went to google and searched for a stock photo to go along with Jordan's basketball story. Finding photo's was surprisingly easy and I decided to do the same for the bumblebee teaser.
I then looked at the day's frontpage of the R&B, I liked the teasers with photos that they had surrounding the headline, which led me to include some on my front page as well. I also saw that it was OK to have these teaser photo's somewhat covering the papers name, which in some cases looked pretty creative.
I chose which stories to cover by reading through them and deciding which I thought would be most relevant and most likely to appear on the cover of a paper. I took into consideration the timeliness (for example, I really liked the holiday story but felt like since Valentines day and St. Patricks day are over, and there aren't any holidays coming up until July 4th, that it would look odd to put that kind of story on the cover). I also thought about the relevancy of each story, for instance the budget cuts story was obviously very relevant to anyone associated with UGA, which is why I chose that story to be on the cover.
My overall experience of creating this front page was frustrating at first, but once I became accustomed to the many tools and options of the program, it was easy to place text and photos. I enjoyed the leeway I had to be creative in deciding how I would design my front page. Once I started over and began designing for the second time, I felt much more ambitious and was satisfied with how it turned out, which was both relieving and gratifying. I would not have been able to complete this front page without the insightful help from both my classmates and Amber. Thanks guys!

A Very Grady Blog Post

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.