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I designed the page which dealt with news about the downtown Athens area: Zingo, donation meters, restaurants. The Zingo story had the best picture, a portrait of one of the drivers with his scooter, so I made that story my dominant one using an "L" layout, sort of like this newspaper did on their front page. The Zingo article takes up the entire top half of the page, leaving me with the bottom to split between the other two stories.

I had to do some heavy editing on the restaurant piece in order to fit both stories on the bottom half of the page. The donation story was edited down a bit too, and while this process was tedious and time-consuming, it definitely taught me the importance of being able to pick out the most important information in a story and eliminate the extraneous. 

I originally had the bottom half of the page split into two almost equal sides, with bumping headlines. When Joe pointed out that this was a concern, I made the photo of the donation larger to take up two columns worth of space, and split that story's headline into multiple lines, which I hadn't thought to do before. I then found a graphic for Zingo to put in some space left behind, and that added a great element of interest to the page. I think it's very important to break up the text on a page, whether you use photos or pull interesting graphics from outside resources, so that the reader is not overwhelmed by grey matter.

This activity really taught me a lot about design and about the tools that are used in creating a newspaper layout. I am a magazine major, and I am excited about using InDesign in my career. I was frustrated at first, as I had little experience with the program prior to our lab, but I now feel like I have a good foundation of knowledge on which to build.