Saturday, 6/26

USA v. Ghana

Disaster Date

I paired the World Cup match with a lovely Arbor Mist Strawberry Zinfandel. I was only two or three glasses in when, sadly, Ghana scored early on overtime, leading (much) later to a Ghana win. All to the tune of those damn vuvuzelas, which make me thing at any moment a horde of bees are going to attack. But either way, sad.

Disaster date. My friend's BF loves Disaster Date, and while he exercised (lame-- and by that I mean I'm jealous of fitness), I started in one the Bennett Family Russian River, a light chardonnay. I would say more, but really I know nothing about wine other than I prefer white to red and it gets me feeling groovy way faster than beer. We have seen the same guy as the date, waiter and background actor in three in a row. This show is bad and has nothing on Next or, a long, long time ago, Singled Out. That hasn't stopped me from watching an episode per glass (4). Also, a guy was eating pasta during one of the dates, and I am looking quite forward to being driven to a certain downtown restaurant for pasta and delicious )hopefully alcohol absorbent) bread.

Friday, 6/25

In my page, I had two stories along with two jumps from the front page. Since there are a lot of words on my page, I tried to make it as appealing as possible while still fitting all the stories. I included two photos to the two complete stories which would draw the readers’ eye to them. I felt that the jumps did not need photos because people who were reading those stories were already invested by the time they made it to page 2. The stories did not come with photos so I found these stock photos online. I wish they were more original but the quality is good and I feel they go along with their respective story. The placement of the photos was also important because I did not want to put them too close together or in an awkward position. The top photo of the lab student was placed facing inward towards the rest of the page. The boy at the computer is also facing inward. This is important because in brings in the page instead of directing the readers’ eyes away from the page. This is seen in the NY Times today. The pictures such as the man in the upper left hand corner, are all facing inward towards the center of the paper. On the Red and Black front page, it would have been better if the car at the bottom was facing towards the page, instead of away from it.

The columns also allowed me to add variety to a seemingly wordy page. The jump on the bottom was stretched out to four columns instead of five. This not only allows the story to fit better but gives variety to the page. The headlines were difficult to fit the allotted space and some do not stretch the entire way but I do not think they are too distracting. Overall, I feel my page emphasizes the news stories on the page with placement and pictures as well as fitting in all the stories.

Page 3 Design

I was assigned to design page three. I did not have any of the jump stories from the front page which was lucky, I did have stories that directly affect campus life.

The stories at the top of the page are both about campus expansion. The first story is about the expansion to the University Health Center. The second story was about the expansion to the Tate Student Center. Both were important to students and faculty and needed to be toward the front of the paper.

Because the two stories were very similar, I wanted to make it a package story. That is when I got the idea to use a headline for both stories then using pictures to distinguish what the stories were about.

I made the stories two columns after talking to Joe to see what the best way to go about making all of my ideas fit together. By using the four columns across a 5 column paper, the stories were equal and I did not have to try to make one story two columns and the other three.

The third story about budget cuts was very straight forward. The was no question that it would be an L shape with the graphic to enhance the story. I really liked the graphic because it was so cleanly made and very easy for readers to read.

The budget story was given to my page because it is also involving campus life and it is good to see where the money in the budget is actually going.

Legendary

Okay, not really legendary...
Anyway, for the front page I took the designs of a few fellow classmates and kind of combined them together. It's been long enough for me not to remember what got taken from whom, The dominant element on the page, Doggie Dreams, was pretty central in all of the designs. I started with it one one side, but decided to take it to the middle to make it framed better and look more featured. There are very few other elements on the page outside of text, so I decided to do what I could with lines to make it stand out. My regret is that the top line is not equidistant from the picture as the side lines, so it almost looks cramped at the top. Hate it, but spilt milk, right?
The top story about fundraising was almost a no-brainer R&B kind of choice, but I had the dollar rule in mind when I created the pull quote. Also, Joe helped me decide to make the story four columns instead of five so the quote would look symmetrical, a must for me. And while I didn't have the space to use a heavy leading, I did use one of the pretty line/box options.
The bar at the bottom to me looks a little juvenile, but I'm dealing with it. I needed to bring in way more pictures and color, so a playful little "bottom bar" was one of very few options. I thought about a sidebar, but I couldn't fit the right and left single-column stories on just the right side. It would have looked very cramped and nasty. So, color accomplished! I loved the picture of the bee, and I also chose to use a custom green for lines at the bottom and the section under the flag to connect the top and bottom.
It other front page design news, this totally caught my eye on Newseum today. While overall the page to me seems a little bit crowded, I am in love, love, love with that awesome picture of the spider sculpture and the visual perspective there. Props. And generally I like the layout of the rest of the page except the bottom right-hand corner. I think it's the summer movie graphic that doesn't do it for me.
I also think how this was done is a good example of having really one dominant visual on the middle of the front page but keeping things interesting with the top and bottom. I am peeved, however, that the other right top headline does not cover all the text. I know it's hard (trust me, that health center headline had about 20 different versions, no hyperbole), but I think it looks so much better when it is fuller.
Great time in this class!

Page 7

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.

My page initially had three tremendously long stories, all of which were accompanied by photos. The Hallmark story had one associated photo, little red book had three or four and the streaking story had quite a few copies of old Red and Black pages. To fit all the stories on the page, it was immediately clear that I would have to be very selective on which pictures made it into the design.

The Red and Black pages were bland and difficult to see, so they were immediately cut. For the little red book story, I wanted to use a picture that hinted at how many people were involved with the publication. As the Hallmark story only had one picture, the choice was easy.

It was apparent that I would have to cut huge amounts of the stories to get them all to fit. The streaking story was especially long, and in my personal opinion not very interesting. Luckily I caught I break and was able to replace that story with a jump from the front page about social media. As this was only half a story, it gave me considerably more space to work with.

After editing the stories down (and adding another picture with my new-found room), I tried to find a way to alter the appearance of the page. As it was, I had both stories on the right fitting into four columns, and I felt the page was running together because of it. Experimenting with a different number of columns in both stories was fruitless so I added a rule and some more white space to create distance between the two stories.

I'm pretty happy with the way the page turned out, though I do think it is a little bland. Shorter stories and ad space would have helped make the page more interesting in my opinion.