Nighttime in downtown Louisville. It has segued from crisp to cold- at least for a guy who’s spent the past few years in Singapore and Florida.
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The nickname for Louisville, at least according to slogans I see everywhere, is “Possibility City.” It is a nice backdrop for two other memorable sessions I attended today- one also on collegiate news design and one on feature writing.
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A few of the basic lessons I scribbled down during the design session, led by Rick Brooks, a soft-spoken, impassioned “yearbook pro” from Jostens:
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A quality news design should grab attention and communicate something in three seconds or less. First impressions are everything.
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Go with your gut on design. If you feel like something’s off, missing or just bad, dive back in or scratch and redo.
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According to a trusted survey, Myriad is the most popular font among designers for news headlines and Garamond is most popular for body copy.
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Seek design inspiration from unlikely sources, including movie and campaign posters. He specifically cited game-changers such as the Obama “Hope” poster and posters for the films “Juno” and “Seven” (apparently it jumpstarted the mass use of fun “grunge font”).
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Consider converting a color image to black and white when you want to better freeze a moment in time.
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Three web tools he plugged, the latter two new to me: Wordle (for word clouds), Yearbook Yourself (fun photo editing program), and Shape Collage (another creative photo editing program)
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A few tips on news features shared in a separate early afternoon session led by Lori Brooks, the associate director of student media at Oklahoma University:
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Search for the story behind the story. For example, she cited not covering the football game each fall Saturday but the many people and routines surrounding it- the mascot, the stadium announcer, the third-string QB, the post-game stadium clean-up, etc.
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Do a day-in-the-life report. She suggested figures to follow such as the university president, famous faculty, campus security, a disabled student or a parking attendant.
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Always think alternatives, either as siders or full reports: how-tos, Q&As, lists, by the numbers breakdowns, timelines, etc.
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An easy way to contrast straight news and features: A news story is about a building that burned down. A feature is about Joe Schmo who lost the only photo of his mother in the fire. In her words, a feature is “more personal, in-depth, and not as breaking.”
