Page 9 - Pet Life

I had to design a page with cute animal stories. One is about guide dogs on campus, one about doggie parks and one about pet alteration. So, first off, I decided to do a "section" on animals too draw all of the stories together. I went back and forth between different titles, but finally decided on "Pet Life." I figured since it was about the life of pets - their "job" as guide dog, their "play" at parks, and their "medical" decisions at vets - "Pet Life" seemed to be an appropriate title to cover it all.

Next, I decided on how to separate the stories. I decided to put the story with the cute cat and dog picture at the top and make it the dominant. Then I decided to put the guide dog story on the side, and the dog park story on the bottom. Initially, I had all the stories with the same column width; however, to break up the stories, I gave the bottom story wider columns. I thought this made it easy to move around on the page as well. I ended up using the "L" design on both top stories with the photos on the right hand side of each story. To keep them from looking the same, I made sure the photo sizes were different enough to separate the two story designs, and I made one of the headlines stretch over the photo as well as the text. You can see a similar design here in the New York Times. For the bottom story, I placed the photo on the left hand side and let the story fill the right block of space. The New York Times always has a story design similar to this. The only difference is the Times' story had the headline across the story and photo, which I really wanted to do as well. However, limited space, because of story lengths, kept me from being able to.

The most enjoyable part of the page design was creating the "Pet Life" header. I had lots of different ideas, but decided to stay pretty simple. I had several different types of clipart and photos; however, in the end, the bulldog won out. I had to show my "Georgia" loyalty with the bulldog, seeing that I am originally from the University of Florida Gators area. Once I got the bulldog image, I "mirrored" the image so the dog are both looking into the page (with some help from my awesome teacher Joe Dennis and a fellow classmate). So, I then decided on a bold, all-caps, block font and a bold line underneath the text to pull the section title together.