Internship Series: The Virginian-Pilot — Week 12
The final week. The final designs.
Last week was my final week at The Pilot. It was bittersweet, but still full of a lot of fun, creative and digital designs that I was excited about.
Illustrating for sports
This week I had an interesting column about the University of North Carolina’s inability to accept that their academic scandal has ruined their image.
A lot of what I was thinking about initially was a “tarnished image” or “degraded image.” But neither of those really seemed to lend itself to a clear illustration, since it’s hard to get across the idea of a tarnished piece of metal.
At some point the idea of a “image” led me to think of a broken mirror, and since the story mentioned that UNC has won many different championships during this scandal, a broken trophy made a lot of sense.
I had a lot of fun making it and experimenting with the divide tool in Illustrator. I thought it would make a lot of sense if the article started in the place where names would have been engraved on a trophy stand.
The rest of the page came together with some nice photography (and digging through AP’s photos for the perfect photo of Kam Chancellor) to keep the page very visual and tie it into all the people mentioned in the articles.
Online logos and GIFs (with a soft “g”)
This week, I finished up a logo I was working on for 757teamz.com (The Pilot’s high school sports section). After collaborating with the online editor and the sports editor and seeing what social media graphics they already had, I developed a versatile logo that could be edited to fit with any sport they needed.
Since The Pilot is also nearing 100,000 likes on Facebook and 100,000 follows on Twitter, I made a GIF to celebrate.
Considering my GIF skills are pretty new, I was very excited that I got to make something for The Pilot. I wanted to keep it newspaper themed, but still have that online element, so I created my own icon of the computer mouse and newspaper icon. Making this was surprisingly simple; I just had to adjust the positions of the icons to make them fall at different speeds and look continuous. I’m excited to see them use it online!
The last front page
For my last day, I asked if I could do A1, just so I could come full circle and end back where I started, with news.
The front page lede was a follow-up to the Ocracoke and Hatteras island blackouts on North Carolina’s outer banks.
Unfortunately, we only had two new photos, one of cars heading into the islands and another of a family posing in front of their car. Since the story didn’t focus primarily on the family, I chose to go with the photo of the cars.
The only other front page article with art other than headshots was a profile on Kenny Easley, who grew up in Norfolk and used to play for the Seattle Seahawks. He was getting inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
I always like doing pull quotes for profiles, and the photo we had of him had plenty of negative space for me to place one.
The other articles just used headshots to accompany them, along with fact boxes, and then reefer to other articles inside.
On my last day, I ended up asking everyone on the presentation desk to take a picture with me, to fully capture the memories of the summer. Pretty much everyone made it into the photo except the News Editor, who insisted he just take the photo instead. Ah, well. Win some lose some.
Since this is a picture of a picture, it’s hard to see everyone, but you can really see “The Virginian-Pilot” in the background.
This past summer was really an incredible experience. I learned so much about dealing with breaking news, creating a whole concept to put together a story, working with the copy and sports desk to collaborate on headlines and picking the right pictures to use and deciding what information to pull out of a story.
The other designers were amazing. They not only helped me navigate the CMS system (which was quite difficult), but they were always so happy to give me advice on my designs and offer suggestions on how to make them better.
At The Pilot, I never felt like I had to restrain my designs. Everyone, especially the director of presentation, was so encouraging of taking risks, trying new things and having a lot of fun with design. For that, I really can’t thank everyone enough.
This is the twelfth installment in our internship series, where our contributors recount their news design internship experiences in weekly updates.
