Like local journalism, local design matters
As The Virginian-Pilot considers outsourcing their design, it’s important to think about why local design is so important
On October 23, The Virginian-Pilot announced they would be laying off ten percent of their staff and offering buyouts to long-term employees.
The article also mentioned that “the company is seriously considering outsourcing its print news production and design.”
I spent three months last summer sitting in The Pilot’s newsroom, usually from 4 p.m. to midnight (or later) designing pages, creating illustrations, and collaborating with and getting feedback from other designers and copy editors.
This experience was invaluable.
I learned how important it is to sketch out pages and how to deal with a front page that has had three of its four stories change last minute. I gained a greater understanding for what good design really is.
Design is the first thing people see when they look at a newspaper. It’s what makes people stop on the road, pick up a copy and read articles. Design is meant to serve the content: it makes complex stories easily understandable and communicates information effectively.
Good design is engaging. Good design is exciting. Good design is effective. Pilot design is all of these things — and Pilot design is more than just those things.
Pilot design is unique.
Pilot design is known for its creative use of visuals, for using non-modular design successfully and for being able to take a story with almost no art and create an eye-catching page regardless. And it’s paid off.
From 1992–2015, The Virginian-Pilot has received 308 awards and won World’s Best Designed Newspaper in 2001 from the Society for News Design. They have also won hundreds of awards from the Virginia Press Association.
On a more personal note, The Virginian-Pilot has been a huge source of design inspiration to me. They were one of my very first design inspiration sources. They flood my newspaper design Pinterest board and I’ve tweeted their designs for #dailydesigninspo more times than I can count. The innovation and straight-up awesome designs were a big reason I wanted to become a news designer in the first place. I wanted to come up with cool ideas like “obsessively” marking the lengths of letters for an article about OCPD or having an entire page of quotes for the Fourth of July.
I was beyond thrilled to intern for them last summer and contribute to their design team. I was never afraid that my designs would be too “weird” or “out-there.” I was more concerned about my designs not being weird enough or that I wasn’t taking enough risks. The Pilot encourages new ideas, different ways of thinking and trying things that you’ve never even considered.
One of the more difficult parts of my internship was trying to design for long-term articles or stories that I wasn’t familiar with because I wasn’t a local. This is why design by local employees is so important: they understand the culture and lives of the people they live with.
It’s so important to have The Virginian-Pilot design be in-house. In-house design means articles are designed by locals, by people who are affected by, interact with and live around the stories that are being reported. Having a full understanding of the article and the people being reported on means you know the images that audiences respond to and the people the audience wants to see.
Local designers know the stories that continue to resurface over the years. They understand why people care about and follow people, stories and events. At The Pilot they know that people have been following Travion Blount, why they love Harborfest, what military and navy homecomings mean to the community and more things than I could ever think of, because I was only there for three months. The designers and copy editors have been there for years.
Working in the same newsroom as reporters mean you can ask them questions. It means you can collaborate with them while they’re writing the story to make sure the design best fits the content and give them thoughts of what ideas you want to help them convey through design. That back and forth is a valuable part of constructing an accurate and effective narrative. Knowing the reporters means a deeper respect and value of their articles.
Working side-by-side with the copy team means coming up with headlines full of puns (and The Pilot loves puns), clever references to local nomenclature and the ability to perfectly display type to fit with the design.
It means talking with the copy editors to figure out which tweets about Trump are best to put on the front page (above). It means asking what the most important parts of Jack Ankerson’s (a long-time sports announcer in Hampton Roads) life is for a timeline (above). It means laughing when they ask if you can make enough room for the headline “Fantastic quirks and where to find them,” and you respond with “Absolutely, yes, I love any and all Harry Potter related references.”
At the beginning of my internship, I got a T shirt that said “Journalism matters” on the front. Great journalism needs great design. Since journalism matters, design matters. And The Pilot has great, unique, local design. It’s a mistake to lose it.
