Assignment: Design the front page of a newspaper and a magazine spread using pre-selected stories.
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Rationale:
For the newspaper, I placed the Dwamish river story at the top to convey its importance, which is also demonstrated by the bolded, large headline and the large image. I implemented a kicker headline in the second most important story. I included a graph because it demonstrates the data clearly and it contrasts with the other pictures. Although the branding story was not quite as important considering it isn’t hard news, I thought the visuals were strong and deserved to be included on the front page.
The recall story, however, was newsworthy and warranted a front page, but the visual element was not good. I decided against including the picture because it seemed low quality and it would make the front page too busy. To make sure it didn’t get lost, I bolded the caption but kept it small to reinforce the hierarchy. Originally, I was not going to include the book story, but I liked the idea of an odd number of stories to make the layout more visually appealing (although that isn’t a design rule). I tried to align the pictures so they had text between them and followed the backward S shape.
For the magazine layout, I selected the branding story because it was interesting and had great visual components. For the left side, I selected a dark brown/red color that complimented the colors in the pictures. At first I chose a more whimsical font, but after creating the boxes on the righthand side, I thought straight-edge block lettering would look better. That being said, I knew I wanted sans-serif font to achieve the feeling I was going for. I removed the sky from the left page but found the design was too plain, so I included the photo caption following the line of the mountains, which I think balances out the more traditional font.
For the right side, I knew I wanted to keep going with heavy use of the visuals. The picture of the man is intentionally at the bottom so his eyesight goes toward the other two pictures above him. I did not want his picture to take up the entire length of that side, so I implemented a side saddle with the photo captions in order to not detract from the visuals.
