Internship Series: The Virginian-Pilot — Week 4
Wild days and realizing how much you’ve learned
Friday was a whirlwind, an absolutely crazy and awesome whirlwind of news design. Instead of being assigned to just inside A, or the A1 and its connecting pages, I was assigned to the entire A section, which was a hefty load. I had my usual eight hour shift to design nine pages. It was stressful and difficult, but those are the times when you tend to learn the most, so it ended up being a good experience.
The front page
The front page for Saturday was supposed to mainly focus on Harborfest, a huge festival that takes place for three days in June every year and celebrates the Army and Navy with a Parade of Sail, food, fireworks and a flyover.
I was excited to see the Harborfest photos, especially the front page one, which was a huge drone picture of the waterfront.
The night, news and photo editors all wanted the picture to completely dominate the page, and even after I had originally placed it, they told me to make it even more prominent by making it cover more than half the page. I wanted to keep the text that went along with it simple, and I liked the idea of the headline bleeding into the photo.
Everything else on the page was kept clean, but I put a bit more emphasis on the Trump story to make sure there was a clear news lead even if it was so much smaller than the photo.
It was definitely a front page unlike anything I had done at The Pilot, but it reminds me of the front pages I do at school — dominated by one article, with something much smaller at the bottom, or in this case, two small stories and some teasers. I really enjoyed getting to spend time working on a drastically different front page from the ones that are usually printed.
Sometimes, working under pressure is good
The rest of Friday was spent quickly putting together the other eight pages that I had to do, and it was a constant stream of work: placing photos, arranging articles and writing headlines and decks.
If there’s one thing I learned after Friday, it’s that sometimes you need the pressure of a deadline to produce some great design work, and sometimes the pressure makes you realize how much you’ve learned. When you have a time crunch, you can’t spend ten minutes deciding which shade of blue you like better or whether you prefer the text more when it’s two picas to the right. You just have to make a decision.
The decisions that you make under pressure are also telltale signs of what you’ve learned. I knew immediately why I was picking certain fonts for different articles while I worked. When I saw photos, I knew exactly whether I wanted to overlay the text on them or not, and when confronted with a blank page and five different articles, it didn’t take me long to configure them into a neat page layout.
I obviously still have a lot of learning to do at my internship, but working under pressure really made me realize how much I have already learned and I was proud of what I could produce in such a short period of time.
This is the fourth installment in our internship series, where our contributors recount their news design internship experiences in weekly updates.
