Page from: Emily Killian | The Star

LIKE PUPPIES? Who doesn’t? Here’s a page from Emily Killian that will give you a grin. Her note and some remarks from you-know-who follow.

FROM EMILY: I do fewer than a handful of pages a month. Here’s one I worked on this week.
I’m not 100 percent thrilled with it…but I did put a lot of work in there.
I shot the photos of wiggling animals (I openly admit they’re crappy), wrote the column, organized an online feature (narrated slideshow of photos I took at the shelter, etc.), gathered the info about the dogs, and designed the page—from the logo to the cutout, to the 900 million breakout boxes. Whew!
I fear that it’s too busy, but it’s chock-full of information (and cuteness!).
Anyway, what do y’all think?

FROM ED: Overall, I like the page. I really like the “PAWSOME” head.

A couple of nits:

1. I would have made the smaller fotos all the same depth and let the type with them run uneven at the bottom if I couldn’t trim.
2. Cropping the top of the puppy’s head in the lead foto bothers me.

So…thoughts? Criticisms? As Emily says: What do y’all think?

Page from: Mark Weber | Southwest Newspapers

NEWCOMER MARK WEBER sends along this tab spread…with some questions. So there’s no confusion, Southwest Newspapers is not in the Great American Southwest. They serve the southwestern suburbs of Minneapolis.

Mark’s page follows. Below it: Mark’s note to me and a response I emailed to him last week.

FROM MARK: A colleague and I caught your design workshop at the recent Minnesota Newspaper Association convention. Awesome!

Attached is a page I am offering up for review, and an offbeat question with it.

Like many newspaper organizations, we are charging ahead on the creation of niche publications, and getting into design issues that, for us, are uncharted.

One of those issues is the typeface used for body copy in alternative publications. The page I’m submitting is for a prototype women’s magazine (glossy) that we’re working on, and the graphic designer has chosen Rockwell Light 9 point (10.8 auto leading) for the body copy.

Is this an appropriate typeface? We’re looking for something other than what’s used in our newspapers, which is Nimrod.

MY RESPONSE: To my thinking, Rockwell is too stylized (extra long serifs, characters that are too round and geometric) for comfortable reading. There are some sans serifs that serve well for text. Franklin Gothic, Myriad and Frutiger are three that come to mind immediately.

You may also want to look at Benton Sans, Formata, Interstate and Meta. I’d stay away from Helvetica. Although it is highly readable, it also is highly boring. The others I’ve named all have some character in their characters.

What are your thoughts? What type faces would you recommend…and why?

Pages from: Lauri Shillings | Journal Review

WHEN YOU CAN DESIGN the page—including the ads—from scratch, the possibilities for something new and different increase exponentially. Lauri Shillings took advantage of those possibilities recently. Her note follows. I’ve placed a quick comment below her pages.

FROM LAURI: I’m sending along 3 ‘feature’ pages from a recent series on the small towns in our area.

I was charged with making an advertising-based page, and with flowing in the editorial copy.

We wanted a fun, engaging look to the pages, so I made all of the ads round. Since I get to make the ads and flow in the copy, I can tweak the placement of some things so it works with minimal overlay.

Still not sure if I’m comfortable with this, but it is a limited run feature, and not every day. So I guess I can live with it.

Ready for any  critique the readership might have!

FROM ED: I like ’em! I’m not at all concerned about the ads “intruding” on the columns, though some purists may swoon. One complaint: Wordspacing in text in the second leg sometimes gets far too wide and very distracting. Really needs adjustment. Example: 12th line down in second leg of the Lagoda page (just above). We need to pay attention to this and fix it!

How about the rest of you. Comments? Criticisms? Would you do this at your paper?

Page from: Larry See | The Mead County Messenger

NEWCOMER LARRY SEE submitted this page with the note that he’d “like to refrain from comments until the end.” From that, I assume he wants to see what we have to say first…then he’ll jump in with some follow-up comments of his own.

Larry notes that the Messenger is a 5,340 weekly near Louisville, Ky.

Larry’s page and my comments follow.

FROM ED: Ouch! This is a page that requires substantial redesign, from the teasers and the nameplate to the headlines to the captions to the UPC/index package at the bottom. Some quick points:

1. Avoid oval photos, even in teasers. It’s an approach reminiscent of high school yearbooks in the 1960s.

2. The design of the nameplate and ancillary information is outdated.

3. Let’s look for something more readable than Times for body copy.

4. We can also do better than Times for headlines. Times has been overused.

5. Word spacing in captions needs adjustment.

6. There’s too much going on here: The fire package almost seems to blend into the ice storm package, despite the blue tint block.

7. Tint blocks behind photos tend to bleed the impact of the photos.

8. Wasted space in the bottom UPC/index package.

9. Gutter runs the entire depth of the page between second and third columns.

10. Teaser type is too tiny to deliver any impact.

So…there’s my 10 cents worth. I think Larry needs to hear from the rest of you. Please chime in—then we’ll see what he has to say!

…………….

UPDATE: Here’s a comment and a suggested revise (see page below) from Lauri Shillings:

“Ed:

You know me- I’m more of a visual person. Here’s my VERY bad, VERY messy (OK, Lauri, I cleaned it up a bit!) cut and paste job of what I would have done with the front page submitted by Larry See. NOT perfect by any means, but it’s the same info—different layout.”

Here’s Lauri’s revised page: