9/13/11

week 25: boundries


this was something that i did around two years ago. it was back when i was working as an artist at a local newspaper, and one of my jobs was to design the weekend section, basically your leisure and arts  that would have main feature that highlighted whatever was going on that week in the county. if i recall correctly that week there was a local high school that was doing a play set in the 20's.

no one of the issues that i had with the mentality of the editors is that that it was out-dated and inflexible, and for the time that i was there had nearly every idea that i had for getting more people interested in the dying institution that are news papers in this age of digital media were shot down, often quite rudely.

their idea was basically slap some photos of a few teens in old drama costumes rehearsing on half built stages and then run the story underneath.

it was, what would be come to be termed as "plug and play", "cookie cutter", or the "mimi special".

mimi being the editor of that section.

basically it was boring, uniform and not all that interesting. it didnt challenge people, it didnt push any boundaries, it was just... there.

to further illustrate my point, here is a typical example of what i have been talking about... note that this one was done last month.


so that week i decided to ignore the rough dummy i was handed and decided to design a page of my own (not too risky as i could make the page they had in mind in about five minutes assuming they were on the ball and had their story content in on time for once).

and this is what i got, basically what i wanted was the image above, no photos (i planned to put those in the jump) and flow text along the line of her form, creating a beautiful curving line of text that hugged her outline and providing the paper with something new, something different.

the idea was initially not well received.

i was told by our managing editor that it it was basically crap, and that it wouldnt work because there werent any photos.

luckily i had a supervisor who knew what he was doing and managed to find a compromise that let the spirit of the layout survive at least in part, we shoehorned head shots of the cast under the headline and messed with text size to make everything fit and it went to press.

the result:



anyway we made it work, it looked good and...

and not another word was said about it.

i think it was right around then that i knew that i was wasting my time and energy there.

3 comments:

Joshua Fountain said...

Welcome back. :) I have been awol myself as my internet time took a backseat to my personal life. It is a shame that that paper never let you realize your full potential and truly express your great talent. Newspapers are dead anyhow. Maybe I need to finally write a damn book and have you illustrate it. ;)

Unknown said...

sounds like a plan, man.

i wish i had a penguin friend said...

Glad you got out of there!