Skip to content

Newspaper Design

Newspaper Design
Last semester I worked at the Index and did page layout and designed small information graphics. I learned a lot when it came to dealing with a lot of text. The Index put to use the idea of modular design. Modular design is where each story and things related to a story can have a box drawn around it. So you can’t have a story (including related photos) laid out in any shape other than a rectangle or square.

Graphic Design is a much broader spectrum than Newspaper Design. So a lot of times you can recognize the graphic designers that have worked a lot with newspaper, because they start using newspaper-only design rules in their other types of design. For example, using justified text, when left-aligned is much more pleasing to the eye; or being limited to only one typeface because that’s how they did it at the newspaper. It’s ok to use 2 typefaces, and they don’t have to be the same ones for every design.

Here are two frontpages that I did the layout for.

This first page layout is an example of what we would do every week. This time we had a unrelated photo to add, and it usually has a unique title. Well, for filler text I put “Grapes of Wrath” with the tree photo… and the copy-editors liked it and kept it. So, you never know when your spur of the moment thoughts will be worth something.

For this one, I had to come up with a concept to go with the story. I chose to have a photographer shoot a photo of a person laying on the floor with a toe tag on their foot. I then cropped and colorized the photo to look dead. I also had to create a shadow below the foot on the ground because the photo ended.

Leave a reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.