Internship Series: The Virginian-Pilot — Week 8
This week I tried to design things that were out-of-the-box. It was time to take some risks.
Last week, I worked overtime on Sunday, and to be honest, I was really disappointed with how the news section turned out. It was a pretty dull section, led with excellent photography, but it looked like any other front page that might get thrown together for any newspaper.
To be fair, I know that not every single front page can be THE BEST FRONT PAGE OF ALL TIME. But what disappointed me more than how the page turned out was how complacent I seemed to be while putting it together. It came together unconsciously, and when I got home and realized that I had been on autopilot all day, I was pretty mad at myself. I’m not doing my job as an intern if I’m on autopilot. I need to be trying new things, stretching my own abilities and getting feedback, opinions and ideas from everyone who has been in the industry longer than I have .
So I decided it was time to work that much harder, and put together better pages.
The perfect opportunity
Opportunity came knocking a couple days later when I was assigned to the sports section for Wednesday’s paper. The story that was going to lead the front page was about baseball players responding to fanmail, but it didn’t have a lot of compelling photos to go with it, so I thought I might do some kind of illustration.
I was inspired by a graphic that I made a few years ago for when Elon’s student paper would receive letters to the editor. I made a little mailbox overflowing with letters, and some letters falling out of the box and onto the ground. I thought it would be a perfect fit.
I wanted the mailbox to be big and dominate the page, so I played around a lot with size, and decided that I really liked having the little red flag go into the section header, and the envelopes extend just past the edge of the page.
I also originally had the background white, but I thought that by adding grass and a blue background, it helped create an entire scene, and distinguished the article from the other stories on the page.
The perfect opportunity part 2
A couple of days later, I was assigned to work on a project. I didn’t know what it was going to be, but the director of presentation told me the day before that it would be for their annual year in review for high school sports. He also sent me a few examples of pages from past years.
All the pages were inventive and fun, and focused around the two male and female athletes of the year. They had big cutouts, bold text and lots of photos to accompany some of the best games, most memorable moments and the best coaches.
The night before, I had been looking at some inspiration on Pinterest to get a feel for how to put together a page with a lot of moving parts.
In the end, most of that inspiration ended up flying out the window, because as I was putting it together and looking at the previous pages, I thought about how it was like a year in rewind.
Boom. Rewind. That word crossing my mind was all it took for me to make that my theme. I grabbed the idea of two backwards arrows, the literal rewind icon, and decided that it would be fun to play off of that shape.
It had a subtle look on the inside spread, distinguishing the different rankings, and provided movement with it’s diagonal lines
But it really popped on the sports cover. I wanted it to be bold and obvious what it was. So I filled the icons with images, and put everything on the page at an angle, to play off of the great movement the icons had. I thought it made the page really stand out, since it’s not everyday where you see angled headline text and huge shapes leaping out.
I ended up really happy with those pages and how they turned out. They were different and exciting and most of all, I’d really pushed myself to come up with fresh designs.
It’s easy to slip into complacency. It’s easy to churn out designs that are fine. That are serviceable. That look alright. But I think getting complacent can be dangerous, because you’re not growing if you’re not pushing yourself to try new things. And you never produce your own best work if you’re stuck doing what you’ve always done.
That’s why I love to push the envelope — because I know that I can do some really cool designs and come up with really cool concepts if I just push myself to think a little differently and stretch my imagination a little bit more than I already have.
This is the eighth installment in our internship series, where our contributors recount their news design internship experiences in weekly updates.
