MY FIRST PAGE!

I was assigned to make the sports page of our newspaper. I was given three interesting stories and two pictures. The first thing I did was decide which story I thought was most important and that would have the biggest headline. I chose the story about Staford and Knowshown leaving the football team to go pro because I thought it was the most "newsworthy" story. After deciding on the story, I decided how I was going to lay it out. I chose to do a "U shape" by wrapping the entire story around a picture of the stadium. I wish there would have been a better picture because the one provided was extremely boring...but it works. The next two stories were more feature type stories rather than news sports stories. One was about a new place that offers shooting lessons and one was about the lack of fans at the UGA basketball games. I loved the picture that went along with the shooting story and I chose to do an "L shape" for that layout. Here is an example of a publication with a similar looking L shape.

The one problem I ran into was having to cut all my assigned stories. I think that publications like this one, look ugly when there is too much text. I had to cut a lot of good quotes out of the shooting story simply because there was no way I could fit the entire story with the picture. Also, I wanted to keep the picture of the guy shooting rather large because I think it's an awesome picture. I think that for next year they should set a word limit to the articles because I think cutting the stories was a problem that most of us ran into. But in the end I think all my stories had just the right amount of text to emphasize the main point of the story and I think the pictures helped make the page strong as well.

Overall I really enjoyed designing my page. It took a lot of time for me because I was not familiar with InDesign before taking this class. I think my biggest problem was that I wasn't confident enough to use the program to it's potential. I got a lot of guidance from Joe and from others in my lab which was really helpful. One thing that made the process easier was that we had a set font for our headline, cut lines and stories. I really liked having that feature because it would automatically change everything to the set style we chose. After this lab I realized how much time and effort really goes into putting together a publication. It requires a lot of team work but also individual work You have to rely on everyone for it all to come together!