Better Living Through News Design

I attended a session about design and how important it is. I enjoy design and find it very challenging so this session was great for me. The speaker was Ron Johnson, a six-time editor of The Best of Newspaper Design. He was informative and the designs that he showed us were very unique.

Some of his examples used pictures that emphasized the story. He stressed the fact that pictures should be blown up. White space is something that we’re always taught looks bad when there is too much. But Johnson disagreed, and said that white space can be used to accentuate content. He showed us a cover that the Indiana University student media had created. It was completely white with black letters that said “Clean Slate.”

 It made me, a reader, wonder what else was in the issue. Something else he talked about that I found interesting was his theory on stories above the fold. He said there shouldn’t be a lot of text, instead a large, strong, dominant image. In many of our CHIMES editions we put important stories above the fold, but they had lots of text with medium sized images. Johnson also said that dramatic crops draw attention to the story. The ID paper cropped a picture so it was horizontal and thin, the content of the image was a man’s chin in an army uniform.

Johnson also discussed the issue of illustrations on the cover as well as within stories. His students wrote a boring, routine story but jazzed it up by using an illustration of a man walking with an umbrella and a piano falling from the sky. Simple things like illustrations can enhance a story. The CHIMES has been using more illustrations within our print paper. Like Johnson said, certain topics can only be shown politely in an illustration. 

~Briana Foisia, '13 | Executive Editor