It's all about design this week. Thanks to Amanda for mentioning the awesome NYTimes magazine ideas edition as it's chock full of awesome stuff.
1. This was on the back page. Kind of a neat idea for expressing patents in America. The drawings are renderings of what the artist thinks the items may look like. What do you think of the small drawings? This covered the inside back cover. Is this effect storytelling? A good way to spice up some boring information?
2. This is a regular column in the NYTimes magazine: Questions For. Peruse the folks interviewed, read one or two. What do you think of the full page interview? The full page dedicated to a single source? Is this something The Voice should look into? What person could fill the page? What group? How could we use this to our benefit? Or, is a full page too much for one story?
Excellent comments this first semester. Enjoy the break.
14 comments:
I absolutely loved this idea. It was really well done and effective in conveying humor, as well as the point. The drawings are well sized, small enough to fit lots, yet big enough to se the detail. The descriptions are short, but sweet and gripping as you make your way to the end of the magazine. I thought it was a great conclusion and summarized some of the key points the magazine was making. The drawings are just as witty, ridiculous, and clever as the patents themselves. I especially liked the Tortoise Bathing Facility, transportable police vehicle decoy, and the reusable pinata system.
Amanda
Yeah I agreed with Amanda. I thought that the drawings were clever. Some of them were really fun too! The drawings were to the point. They did not go on forever trying to illustrate a certain point.
In my opinion, I think it would be really interesting if we did something like that to the Voice on an issue. I think it would add a little bit of humor, and could cause many more people to be intrigued to read the issue.
I read a few of the "Questions For" (Karl Rove,Margaret Atwood, and Charles Murray). I love the full page interview, the questions are so well thought and definitely probe the interviewee. The resulting details are so fantastic, little things that wouldn't come out in any type of article. Just yesterday I had been thinking about how this format could fit into The Voice. While these questions are geared towards each interviewee and are particularly personal, I am a big fan of the Proust questionnaire. Vanity Fair does one every issue and Assouline has a series compiling the answers of some famous people. I don't know if the questionnaire is copyrighted, but it provides some objective, open-ended questions that yield great answers. I think it would be fun to ask random people in the community. But, in that case, I don't think we'd want to devote an entire page to a random person.
Kareem
I agree with Kareem that a full page dedicated to just one person would be too much, especially in a paper as small as ours. But I LOVE the Vanity Fair questionnaire too; it's one of my favorite parts of each issue. These "question for..." articles are also quick, easy reads that I definitely think students would enjoy. The hardest part, though, would be choosing who to interview. Maybe teachers? Or staff members? I imagine people like Bill Meyer or Matt Kemp would be super interesting to hear from.
This could be a good article format for us to think about as we get new writers next semester. It's a basic enough interview, but there's an awesome investigative component if we ask the right questions.
These interviews are really fun to read even if you are not terribly interested in the topic being discussed; the interviewers have a way of making the questions accessible to the reader (who might not know the person being interviewed) and yet still comprehensive and intelligent.
In the end, it all really comes down to the quality of the questions being asked, I think, and then the "flow" of the piece (and which questions actually make it into the paper) just works itself out.
I definitely see the potential for a section like this in the MA Voice, although I do agree that a full page dedicated to one person might be too much for such a small paper.
- Julia
I really enjoyed the illustrations with concise descriptions from the back page of the NYTimes Magazine. Like what Dami said, I think the humorous illustrations with the short writing is an effective way to communicate. I think that readers of the Voice would like this, as it is a nice break from all the text we have, and it also is just entertaining. The illustrations were pretty straightforward too. Not too many complicated or difficult-to-draw pictures were used, so the point was rather clear.
Matt
I have always been a fan of concise interview pieces like the ones found in the "Questions For..." section. In TIME magazine, they always have a "10 Questions For" section which I particularly enjoy because they include stunning portraits of the person and have their signature below (or a note instead, like the most recent interviewee, Viggo Mortenson decided to include).
I think the "My MA" column that we were looking to regularize is reminiscent of the interview section. Honestly, we have had virtually no interest in submitting to the section thus far, and I think switching the format to a questionnaire à la Vanity Fair could be much more successful. It is certainly much less daunting for someone of interest to answer a few pre-set general questions than to be given a word count parameter to follow without a topic besides how MA has affected you. Obviously, since we put out a significantly smaller amount of pages per year compared to the huge magazines and newspapers we are talking about, it makes much more sense that we would allot a column to a half-page max for such a section.
I think we could definitely do with more quick, "fun" interviews in the Voice. In fact, it would be a great way to get more readers because a lot of people just flip through the paper looking for bite-sized pieces or articles about their friends – this could be both.
I agree that a full page is too much for a paper that doesn't come out very often. I think interviews could work as a half/quarter page, or we could dedicate a page and have several.
Maybe we could interview two people and set the interviews up as a debate?
Small Drawings
The NYT drawings are a great way to spice up information. In the Voice, we could use this idea for a feature of some sort. This kind of feature would be effective in conveying a list of information, or statistics of some sort.
For example, maybe we can use these cartoon/caricature style drawings to critique and embellish the various lunches that Acre Gourmet serves. Maybe we can even poke a little fun at them? We could have simple drawings of the different “culinary inventions” the café serves during the week and use concise captions like the article in the NYT magazine.
Day 1: Eight-dollar, dried-out BBQ tofu with steamed broccoli (7,392,039)
Day 2: Organic, caterpillar-seasoned arugula salad (D230,484) (Josh was a victim of this…)
Day 3: Overly sweetened, teeth-rotting “maple” yams (4,229,458)
Day 4: Politically Correct Sloppy Janes (D495,281)
Day 5: Soggy tacos and guac (7,782,594)
Tiras Lin
I really like the idea of a full page interview as long as the question are really thought out as these obviously are. Drafts would definitely needed to be submitted for the interviews themselves before they were done. With the right interviewees, I think something like this in the Voice would be very well read. I like the idea of matt but we did something on him. Its sports but I think Michael Coffino would be good.
And Tiras the maple yams are amazing and the sloppy janes are not politically correct. What if I want to get the vegetarian option? Acre makes me feel like it is feminine to do so. and if I want to be a man I should stick with the meat
I loved the patent cartoons from The New York Times. They appealed to me for several reasons. One reason was that the visuals were just as important as the text, which made it immediately accessable. Another reason was that the text was informative but not overwhelming. However probably the most appealing part of these cartoons was the humor involved. I don't think that the Voice should limit satire or humor to its April Fool's Day edition. As is evident from the American media, people prefer to get their news from a source that will make them laugh.
I enjoyed the interviews from The New York Times. The questions were interesting and flowed well enough that I became engaged even if the interviewee was someone I had never heard of. As mostly everyone else has said, I do not think one page devoted to one person would be a good use of space in the Voice. However, something that might be interesting would be the same one, or two, or three questions asked to several different people. Like ask a student, a teacher, and an adminastrator "Do you like the cafeteria?" or ask a freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior "What is your opinion about minicourse?"
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