Internship Series: The Virginian-Pilot — Week 10

Illustrations everywhere!

This week I had to design pages with articles that couldn’t be displayed through photos alone, so I came up with some illustrations to better represent them.

Work & Money

It was my second time doing the Sunday Business section this week, and since the article didn’t have fresh photos to go with it, I decided to get ambitious and make my own illustration.

When I first read the article about the coal industry spiking over the past year, I latched onto the word “revitalize.”

I was trying to think of ways to get across the idea of a revitalized coal industry, so I typed the word into The Noun Project, a website dedicated to making icons to go with every noun out there, to see what they had. One of the icons depicted someone coming up out of a coffin.

It was absolutely not what I initially had in mind for the article, but I loved the idea of the coal industry coming back to life, so I ran with it and decided to create a coal person coming up out of the grave.

While building the coffin was a pretty simple task, I was surprised at how many pictures of coal I had to sift through where I thought, “this image of coal doesn’t quite match the aesthetic I’m going for.”

Luckily, I found a pretty good image where the coal actually looks like coal and worked well when molded into the form of a human. In this case, I thought an illustration could really capture the heart of the article in a way that a simple photo of coal couldn’t.

The Sunday Break

This past week I also got my first chance to design for the features section, known at The Pilot as “The Daily Break.”

For the Sunday paper, the main article was a feature about Alexandra Zapruder, whose grandfather filmed JFK’s assassination. She has written two books and was speaking about one of them in Norfolk the next week.

I thought it would be great to feature both of her books on the front in an illustration that used photos from both books, and some of the frames of the actual film that her grandfather shot, to help display her work.

To tie everything together, I used a bookmark to frame the whole page while also containing the headline and information for people who would go to the event.

Putting together the entire illustration was harder than I initially planned, since the angles the books are set at led to some complicated shapes, but it was a lot of fun putting together an entire page that could focus on one article. It meant everything on the page got to be linked together.

Overall, I really enjoyed getting to create my own illustrations. Sometimes, when dealing with articles that are hard to explain through photos alone or that focus on more than one subject, an illustration is a great way to hammer home the main point of the article. It’s really satisfying to get to put together a page the exact way you see it in your mind instead of hoping that a photo will fit your vision.

This is the tenth installment in our internship series, where our contributors recount their news design internship experiences in weekly updates.