Leave the unnecessary behind -- Simplicity is the key.

By: Ashley Quick

I had one of the later pages in the features sections in our paper. The two stories I had were extremely wordy and had zero visual elements. Because of this, I had to edit some of the copy and create a very dominant element on the page to make everything fit. I found a picture to accompany the first story on the Invisible Children website. I chose to do a U format with the copy because the L format simply looked strange -- In addition, I felt that the picutre needed to be extremely dominant to counteract the mass amount of copy. Becuase of this, the U format worked best. With the second story, I struggled with how to make the page less copy dominant, and that's when Joe suggested I add a pull-out quote. This breaks up the text enough without forcing some dumb picture in the story. An example of this in the real world can be found here. As you can see, these newspapers from around the world have won awards of excellence in layout and design. The bottom right (still connected to the bottom left) page newspaper display shows a page similar to my layout. This page is has two stories with a large amount of text on the page. This page incorporated both of my techniques -- a dominant picture to bring life to the page as well as a pull out quote -- and it won!

In retrospect -- I do REALLY wish I had added a medium bold line after the end of the top story to add a break (besides the headline of the second story) between the two stories.

The thing I really like about my page is the simplicity of design. Everything on the page has a purpose -- nothing is extemporaneous. I cannot stand pages that have dumb pictures or extra words that are unnecessary -- it makes me want to skip that page altogether. This guy shares the same opinion as me. In addition, I appreciate that our paper uses three fonts or less -- this is not a poster, it's a newspaper and you can tell.

--In general, I wish I could have had an additional picture (a good one) -- but for what I was given to work with, I think the page turned out well.