FREQUENT CONTRIBUTOR Michael has submitted three more pages for review and comment. Check back next week for another trio from Michael. His note follows, then pages…with comment from Ed.
FROM MICHAEL:
Hi Ed. Here’s three more pages for the blog. I’m particularly proud of the A1 with the football banner and reversed nameplate.
The A1 with the voter turnout centerpiece was my solution for not having a lot of art to work with.
Lastly, I hope you don’t mind the “funky font” on the feature package on Halloween haunted trails. Like Kristin Coker, I made an editorial judgment to bend the rules because it’s a fun story and festive time of year (Halloween). As always, however, I fight ads when it comes to the rest of the section front.
Fire away!
FROM ED:
1. The top-of-page treatment is excellent. Were I to suggest any change, it would be to try to make the nameplate just a bit larger.
2. It’s unfortunate that you had to place the postal patron box and the edition information to the right of the story, but I don’t know where else I’d have put it. Like you, I would not have wanted to trim the width of the photo. Perhaps a .5-point rule to the right of the story would have helped.
FROM ED:
1. Nice work with the voter package. Did you consider darkening the red on the curtain? The red here is very aggressive and it’s hard to read the other material against such a bright color.
2. When you have only a very shallow space for text (voter turnout story), consider moving the byline up. Here, you could have placed it to the left of the voter’s shoes.
3. Widow at top of third leg in voter story.
4. Have you experimented with making the UPC code shallower? Most scanners would be fine with a code half this depth.
FROM ED: OK, the only worse thing than the funky font is the design of the pizza ad. Or…maybe the restaurant ad. Or…maybe the executive offices ad. Other than that, it’s OK. Did I ever mention how much I really, rrreeeaaallllllllllyyyy dislike funky fonts?
What do the rest of you think of Michael’s pages? Time to chime in!
The first two pages: Fancy. Really like the voter package. Among other things, how many voter packages do we do? This is different from the random-voter-votes photo, and that makes it stand out.
The third page: Um, I would like to say something nice, but instead I’ll offer suggestions.
1. If style permits occasional use of unusual fonts, then definitely don’t use them for subheads: Too small, too hard to read.
2. I understand the ad problem. I think part of the conflict can be avoided in most cases by the use of 1/4 inch or more of white space between the story and the ads. (More is better but feels like a waste of space to me. It’s a balance.)
3. Might consider some white space between the page header and the story block, too — the pageheader feels crowded as it is, and more so with the story so close to it.
In closing, I really like your flag. (It almost makes me wish we had more letters to work with than the ten in Kearney Hub. But short has its benefits, too.)
Thanks for the feedback guys. Ed, I don’t design ads (thankfully), just the editorial content. There’s little flexibility as far as ads are concerned. I rarely use funky fonts. I was just searching for a fun way to illustrate the story with very little room for news. FYI…B1 always has the same ad treatment and it’s up to me to design around it. As for the barcode, it’s the same size since the 2004 redesign; I will resize if the powers that be approve! I also wrestled with enlarging the nameplate in the football photo, but I went smaller because I didn’t want to compete with the photo. Karen, great points. I will try to air out the elements on the section fronts more.
I like your second page a lot. Very nice.
I completely understand your frustration with the ads. They do look like crap…no doubt about it, but many times (most times) we are not the ones designing the ads and at local/community newspapers, we just have to work with what we have. Sometimes, we get lucky and get nice work. Most of the time we get the pizza ad shown above or worse…you should see some of the non-creative, horrible junk we sometimes have.
But, one thing we all have to keep in mind is that advertising drives our revenue so the customer is always right…just so it doesn’t ever infringe on editorial decisions.