Internship Series: The Virginian-Pilot — Week 9

Small details and tweaks add up to some really nice page designs

This week I really enjoyed adding in small details to help enhance an article or page. I had a great time designing for new sections, but also thinking about how designs can translate across the paper.

Home + Living

In my second opportunity to work with a tabloid sized section, I designed the home+living section of The Pilot. The lead story that week was for drip irrigation. While it’s hardly a glamorous topic and lacks visually striking photos to accompany it, I welcomed the challenge of creating a new design for the front page.

There was just one photo that came with the article, and I wasn’t too keen on putting it on the front since it was just a picture of pipes. I thought an illustration might do the topic justice.

I’ve seen designs in a variety of other articles that show the plant and its roots digging into the dirt, and I thought that would be the perfect starting point. But instead of focusing on the plant and its roots, I could instead focus on the water seeping into the soil instead.

Since an actual photo of plants and dripping water wouldn’t really convey the point, I scoured Thinkstock images to get started with a vector illustration.

Luckily, they had plenty of good plant vectors, so after grabbing a couple of those, I worked on merging them together with illustrations of roots, soil, sky and most importantly, water.

I really enjoy creating my own illustrations for articles, since they can be tailored to fit the point of the story perfectly. Sometimes, photos just don’t do a story justice.

For the sake of time, I usually start with a base illustration from a stock image site and build off of it, but if I have the time (and know-how), then I really enjoy building something completely on my own. It’s much more satisfying that way.

While I didn’t build this one all by myself, I really enjoyed getting to edit it to work as a reefer for the front page of the paper. It was fairly simple, just adding in more plants, but didn’t want it to be a repeat of what was on the cover of the H+L section. So I took a different take, using a sprinkler instead and having the reefer read, “Tired of wasting water with sprinklers?” I was pretty proud of myself for that one — I thought it was a clever workaround.

It’s the little details…

One of my favorite things about design is including small design details to go with an article to get more information on the page, or to make a story pop.

Last Thursday evening, I was trying to figure out what to do about a shark story we were putting on the cover. There were a couple mediocre pictures (at best) online of a bull shark, but nothing great. So when the director of presentation dropped by, I asked him what I should do, and he said to put a little fin above the article. Genius.

I had a bit of fun with it and added in waves and water, but having the small illustration made the story stand out more than a small photo would have. It gave the page some added fun.

Small things like coloring the words “five” and “zero” in a headline and coordinating it with a colored quotation mark really makes my day. They’re the tiny details that people might not immediately notice, but they help to group article together, and keep things cohesive while adding some flair.

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