Although the inaugural issue of "The Scoop" may never be seen on the streets of Athens (but maybe in it's recycling bins), a certain degree of thought went into its creation. These particular pages, as so eloquently designed by my me, are composed with rather a clean and straight forward page design. Though thoroughly uninspiring, I feel the design works well in its simplicity. Unfortunately both the front page and the inside page both feature stories only horizontally displayed, mostly because I'm afraid of gutters. The initial reason for a horizontal spread was to fit as much of the story as possible on the page with the least amount of unnecessary formatting, and while it worked well, if the entire publication was composed this way it would become boring fast.
On the inside page I did use some different package layouts though, I have an L and a U, both of which seem to work out. The U design for my center story with the picture of the yellow Labradors just felt like the best way to try and achieve dominance with that story. It works, but not too well, I think perhaps if I could have made an image package with a few photos it would make the center story stand out more, but the heartrending photo of the Labrador was just too much to pass up, and it works out OK. The Image for the bicycle story was cropped and shrunk to make it as focused as possible as well as make the resolution work on such a large page. The bottom story about Zingo includes what I think is a rather well cropped mugshot of a much larger picture of the Zingo owner, and the story lends itself well to a brief mentioning the owners of the local Zingo branch.
The front page, with almost the same stories (oops), looks really similar by comparison but I think the interior page shows some pretty good improvements over the cover. The front page's image layout has a kind of "zig-zag" awkwardness to it, with and image on the left and text on the right followed by an image on the right and text on the left and so forth. The front page also lacks all those neat little front page-y touches, like jumps or indexes or the weather, which would have broken up the straight image-story format a little better.
The inside page is the only page that received any real text editing. I cut down the Zingo story to a nice 250ish words that fit really well in the bottom slot on the page, and honestly made the story more focused, if much less informative. The top story about bicycle usage on the rise in Athens would have made a great Q&A, but I didn't know how to set up a Q&A with multiple sources, and since I didn't write it I wasn't really sure what question they were responding too. With a little more background info and a little more time the bicycle story would be a really good Q&A alternative format because the story basically just asks questions of the bike aficionados of Athens and gets some really good answers.
The headlines on the inside page were also formatted better than the front page, and the layout and deck usage was more consistent. Attempting to keep the font size and spacing consistent through a page, let alone a whole publication, would be difficult. Except for the obvious snarkiness in the other headlines, I think the top story has a really good headline, deck and cutline, except a used "rakes" instead of "racks" when talking about the photo. Maybe there's a place for snarkiness though, even if its an nearly bankrupt one. The cutline about the labs is totally true though, I've seen the studies. I used a line to separate the stories, and I really don't know if I like it, I mean I know all the "professionals" use it but it seems to be a crutch for clearly demarcating the stories just in case your layout gets confusing.
Overall I would really have liked to see the publication planned out all the way, and as a group I think we would have done alright co-ordinating everything. Or we would've failed miserably, but you know that's just the way it works. It looks like soon enough we won't even be taught the messy details of paper-page layouts, multimedia will be the emphasis which could be cool I guess. Having a photo slideshow for something like bikes around town could be a really cool community input project.
I actually like the "zig-zag" format on the front page. I think that moving the pictures around makes the cover seem more symmetrical and (maybe this is my own craziness) easier to read. I also really like the Nuci's Space picture; something about the spire contrasted with the overcast sky and trees makes this really striking.
ReplyDeleteI also like your layout on the inside page. I'll admit that I'm a stickler for text on inside pages, and you've done a good job making the page heavy on content while breaking up the mundanity (is that a word?) with some good pictures. I mean who can resist a dog?
Lastly, that was an interesting article on the new wave of teaching in journalism schools nationwide. That picture of the Arizona State journalism department building reminded me of one of the four awkwardly dissimilar buildings that make up our forestry school. That is, except it looks cool.