1. Michelle Williams is a popular actress with lots of experience on the screen and in the lives of paparazzi. She is profiled in this weekend's Arts & Leisure section of the NYTimes. This is a great example of a feature piece. How does the author delve into Ms. Williams' life and work without being too personal or too chummy with her? How would you describe the style of this piece? And is it successful in engaging the audience for the duration of the piece? What do you think of the ending? Does it work with the piece? Share your thoughts, comments, brilliance.
Read it.
2. Design, design, design. You can have the most amazing copy, but if the design isn't worth looking at, it doesn't matter. Here is a link to a page that looks at many major news outlets and how they covered Barack Obama's acceptance speech. Scroll through the pages and discuss which pages are successful and which ones aren't. Do you have a favorite? Is there a design The Voice should emulate? What are the different messages being conveyed with the designs? You can click on each page to see a larger version for a better look. Share your thoughts, comments, brilliance.
7 comments:
I've always thought of design as just a way to assemble pictures and text, but seeing all these covers made me think about the way photos and design complement an article and encourage people to actually read it. Some papers, like USA today, crowd so many things in the same space that you could easily miss the cover story altogether. At the other end of the spectrum is the ultra simple - more magazine-like papers such as The Plain Dealer, that put little but the photo on their covers. That paper, in particular, has a spectacular photo of Obama walking down the convention stage. I'd want to read that article (hopefully it lives up to the photo). Obviously, most mainstream papers can't dedicate their entire front page to one article, but that's no excuse for them not to have simple and appealing design. I particularly like the designs of the LA Times and the Boston Globe. They both focus attention on the big article by putting it up top and letting it take up most of the width of the page. They also happen to have grand photos of Obama in front of the stadium full of people. I like that they've picked an article to highlight and that they make it pretty much impossible to miss.
I have always been a visual learner. Whether it is reading a newspaper, magazine, or even just my chemistry textbook, it’s much easier for me to digest material faster if there is a picture to look at.
In today’s world of drive-thru burritos and electronic airplane tickets, most people want their news f-a-s-t and in a manner that is easy to comprehend. The publications, Red-Eye and the Detroit Free Press, appeal particularly to me as their cover photographs just scream, “come look at me!” When I see a striking design, the relationship between a drastically composed image and a short and concise caption will almost always stick with me much longer than any bland, monochrome body of text would. Personally, when I think back to reading about any front-page worthy natural disasters, let’s say, for example, Hurricane Katrina, I don’t remember any statistics about the event, or even how long it lasted. I remember the frightened look on people’s faces and the disastrous physical damage.
The cover of Rocky Mountain News actually took me a couple minutes (and an enlargement in Photoshop) to figure out that it was actually related to Barack Obama. Am I really expected to be able to relate a specific highway to a presidential nomination? It’s an extraordinarily simple albeit abstract design, but it doesn’t get its point across at all.
While the MA Voice should use front cover designs that “get to the point”, it shouldn’t try to emulate publications like Red-Eye. The Voice has to cover the entire MA community, and it is not feasible to place so much importance on one single event. I agree with Ben’s choice of the LA Times as a strikes a nice balance between information and visuals.
-Tiras Lin
While looking at the different designs I really liked the Plain Dealer and the Red Eye. I actually believe that some sort of design that basically draws in the audience and leaves them with a memorable image is the most effective.
With the school audience that we are appealing to I think it would be effective to do this. I always notice quite a few people that don't even open the paper up, but just look at the front cover and put it down. A front cover with a huge photo emphasizing a main theme or story would force people to be engaged and want to look inside to learn more. I truly believe this sort of magazine design would be beneficial for our purposes.
We will definetely get to see how this design pans out with our first edition of the year.
-adam
hands down, my favorite is the red eye. The shadow, the blue, (insert fancy camera terminology like composition here)...it all combines to make this cover the most interesting and eye catching. The shadow distinctly is my favorite aspect. Seeing Obama's hand point from behind as he reads his speech for some reason I find really visually appealing. Also, blue as the main color is something new and different for a newspaper, and for me, new means good and interesting to read.
The newspapers that fail here, in my opinion, seem to be the really popular mainstream ones. Why? Because they have so many other stories to print that they could not dedicate the whole page to Obama. For example, the Wall Street Journal fails miserably to even catch my attention. Instead, the article about the "auto industry's skid" is just as prominently featured as Obama. As Mary taught us last year, top of the page is important, but for some reason, this top-right justification of the small picture just does not cut it.
After reading the article about Michelle Williams I felt really at ease with her as a person. I loved that Mr. Lim doesn't put his own questions into the piece, it makes you feel like you're simply listening to Ms. Williams talk. Lim also makes very smooth transitions between her thoughts about life and her work to more factual information about her life and work. This, along with the fact that Michelle Williams is very appealing in the article, kept me interested until the end. It didn't feel long at all, and just like I wouldn't want to cut a conversation short, I didn't want to stop reading about her. The article feels natural, no hinting questions about her personal life, or at things only close friends should know -- a feeling that most articles about celebrities fail to provoke.
Abigail
Michelle Williams was a person that I did not know very much about. However, after reading the article I felt like I was able to grasp who she really was. I liked how the writer talked about her past in the acting career, but it was not an information overload. Throughout the whole article he brought out information about her past when it was needed. The whole piece flowed together nicely. Once I got to the end I wanted to read more/ I wanted to know more. It felt like she was talking to me personally. This is what I think a good writer poses- being able to write as if the person was actually talking to the reader.
Dami
To be honest the Michelle Williams article really didn't hold my attention very much. It seemed to talk a lot about her career and love life with Heath Ledger in the beginning, instead of presenting a story.
The design covers of Obama were really interesting. My favorite was from the Chicago Sun-Times. It was really interesting to see the visual contrast between MLK and Obama. While people on the news can talk about it, or write about it, actually seeing the two historical figures on a single cover is really powerful. The one from the Charlotte Observer was quite poor in my opinion. It just lacked visually stimulating content. The picture of so much activity really lacks any powerful, significant and perhaps bold statement I think. In general, the others really seemed to convey the message that I think the publication was trying to send.
-Matt Bourhis
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