Attempts At Page Design

For my inside page, I thought I’d take a cluster of stories that had a similar theme and design the page around it. I took my story about the Peace Corps and made that the top one because it had two pictures. I wanted the pictures to be the dominant element, but I wanted one to have more of a presence, so I made the left one bigger and tried to size the one on the right in a way that made it secondary.

Below my lead story I picked a similar story about options for college graduates, and had it running horizontally to give the illusion that it’s shorter. I didn’t want the page to get too text heavy, so I jumped that story as well as the one underneath, which had a corresponding picture.

Because the stories were geared towards college-aged people, I wanted to include some easy-access information for who students can contact in correlation with the stories (Peace Corps recruiter, career center, etc). Some of it was located in the stories, but I wanted the reader to be able to find that information quickly and easily, plus I wanted another element to the page aside from text and pictures. I didn’t have time to look up more specific people with it, so I just listed the Career Center website. If I wasn’t on a time crunch, I would have found some more direct contacts. I also would have liked to make some lines in between stories for a cleaner effect. Towards the end of the page there’s a weird crookedness going on that I’m not too happy about.

My goal for the page was to keep it within the context of a theme, like a magazine, but with the straight-forwardness and clarity of a newspaper. So, the end result had a sort of front-page feel, like this example from today's New York Times, but the content was more along the lines of a campus version of Flagpole. It's definitely an amatuer design, but I learned a lot in the process.