Considering the fact that I have really no idea what I am doing with InDesign and all of the elements that go into composing a page in a newspaper, I must say, I am pretty proud of this first page. When we were going around the room choosing our pages, I kind of just raised my hand a picked a page, not really knowing what the stories I was assigned to edit were going to be about.
The recreation story was pretty interesting, but I wasn’t really sure about the picture. It was more of a story about all of the recreation programs around Athens, and the photo was a little difficult to work with because the caption said it was of a girl walking her two dogs, but one of the dogs was cut out of the picture and they didn’t provide the student’s name. However, this story was the most interesting of the three, so that’s why I placed it at the top and made the photo my dominant image.
The dining hall story was okay. The quotes from the sources were good, and I especially enjoyed the little blurb about Sandra the Snelling Lady because she is popular among the students, but very few people actually know her story. However, I had to cut this story down quite a bit because there was a lot of information that was interesting but not exactly relevant to the story. Some of the quotes were a little excessive, but overall this story was interesting as well. I used the L-layout for the photo I found in order to optimize the amount of story I could fit on the page.
The spring break story didn’t really seem to fit with the rest of my package, but it fit on the rest of my page. The luggage icon was added last minute to give the story a little flair because there was no image. I also had to cut this story a lot to fit it on the page.
Although this page is a front page, they employ a similar design strategy as I did, with a dominant image, a bottom story, and a story running a long the side. This page is also designed in a similar manner.
Designing a page was a really interesting experience for me. I had never worked with a program like this before, and now I can really appreciate what people have to do on a daily basis just to get the paper out. Hopefully in the future I’ll get better at this.
I thought you did a great job with what you had to work with, and I'm with you about having no idea in InDesign. Those are definitely three stories that don't go together at all but I guess that was the case for a lot of our pages. I'm really not sure about the dog picture. I don't want to insult whoever took the picture but the first dog is cut off, and his/her tail is covering the face of the second dog, and like you said, there is no name for the girl. I don't think anything about that picture would fly in a "real" publication, but I guess it's better than having no picture because you have to break up the text somehow (and the girl in the picture is facing towards the text which is good). I like your addition of the suitcase graphic, it adds some color and breaks up the text a little more in just the right place.
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