Flipping through pages
Some of my favorite centerpieces and page layouts
While in college and sometime afterwards, I built my life around journalism. Journalism was my life. But as I progressed in the area of storytelling, I became more and more interested in Alternative Story Forms. I loved the challenge of configuring headlines and designing captivating pages to engage readers. I became addicted to the deadline and learned valuable lessons in time management and thinking on my toes. Here are some of my favorite pages through the years. Page design and copyediting were definitely pivotal stepping stones into graphic design.
This was a GNS story that ran on a very slow press day. In the lineup of AP photos, the polka dotted swimsuit stood out the most. I placed her as the dominate art and played off the playfulness in colors and shape of her swimsuit.
This was my first "Life" cover page and I was nervous. At this point at the newspaper I was comfortable with doing News only and was honestly intimidated by all things Features. Luckily, my editor as well as the Features editor, had faith in me. I was given a group photo and their album covers. There wasn't much to work with, so to give the illusion of a fuller page I anchored it with intersecting stripes, made the band photo the focal point, and thumbnailed their covers with descriptions. It came out very editorial (a good thing)!
Played around with stock gear images within the headline. I believe at the time I was very intrigued by the word "steampunk." It made me think of steam engines, industrialism, and metal. It was important to showcase the photos, so I felt it appropriate to draw attention to the headline.
We always wanted to play up local Features stories, so I worked with the Features Editor to design a page of large numbers for "Back-to-School." We wanted it to be playful so I teamed up with the Graphics Editor to play into the Kindergarten theme and crayon numbers. The countdown continued on inside pages.
The Free Time page in the News-Leader's weekly publications was always a struggle to lay out. It was a local calendar page, but we never had any art to extract from the information. This week, I saw that Ratatouille was listed, and I thought it would be fun to pull an AP photo of the movie and make it look like a reel.
Strong Women broke the cardinal Page Designer 101 rule by putting the story beneath the fold, but the simplicity of the centerpiece and the bold headline draws readers into the story. The effective use of whitespace also aided in the effort. This page won a CAP award for Centerpiece Graphic Design 2007. http://www.chipsquinn.org/news/cap/cap.aspx?id=710
In the Midwest, hunting season is a BIG deal. So why not draw the attention of those readers with a BIG gun? I was designing, writing headlines, and copyediting in Features at this point at the News-Leader.
This night was one of the most stressful, deadline-driven nights I've had. The Olympics story was originally budgeted as the lead story but our centerpiece fell through at the last minute. In a scramble I had to work out a centerpiece for the event without covering the content of the inside pages. There were no event photos yet, so I came up with a headline and pulled together a centerpiece of statistics that could rely on older photography. With the help of my co-workers, it all worked out with less than 5 minutes to spare.
A page of cutouts: I had never designed a page that could have been torn from a magazine. It was a personal milestone. Plus, I had just come from an SPJ seminar that stressed the importance of designing inside pages with as much gusto as designing covers.
I dabbled around in Photoshop to seam the photo with a black background to the black text box i had drawn around the story.
