Thursday afternoon Tracy Collins (pictured right), Senior Director of Operations at the AZ Republic, gave an engaging presentation on newspaper design essentials. Being the adviser to both yearbook and newspaper, I found this session extremely beneficial and applicable to both classes. It was fascinating to see how newspaper design has changed through the years and to think about how design will continue to change, with shrinking grids and even moving towards tabs.
Although I was already familiar with concepts such as modular design, white space, and page balance, I found his “10 Commandments of Type” such a revelation! My newspaper has broken every single one of those commandments – mostly because I didn’t even know they existed or how to fix them! Collins provided many useful tips for hyphenation, justification, kerning, and tracking.
Lastly, his tip to visit Newseum.com every day to view front pages of newspapers around the world is one that I will take back to the classroom. I believe my students will benefit greatly from visiting that site every day.
Sharon Nolan
North Canyon H.S.
Phoenix, Ariz.
Posts
Even though I haven't designed a newspaper yet, I found his tips very enlightening as well. I can picture a lot of those broken commandments on the newspaper we had, and I think it was just a matter of not knowing that ways to change these things existed. I'm looking forward to our inDesign training because I think it will help pull together what we learned about design with how to make the design look right.
ReplyDeleteI am glad you pointed out the tip to visit Newseum. I think starting the class each day with a different front page might be a great bellringer to talk about why it works and what could be different about it.
Rebecca Jackson
Douglas County High School
Douglasville, Ga.
In the box of books we received from ASNE is one on page design. I don't recall the title or who wrote it, but it's packed with page ones from all over the place and also includes lots of sound advice.
ReplyDeleteMark Webber
Vidal M. Treviño School of Communications and Fine Arts
Laredo
I really liked how a lot of the design he taught focused on simplicity. My students are already practicing the simplicity in text fonts, but I need to help them focus now on simplicity in layout. I liked his acknowledgment that The Arizona Republic uses rectangles and squares for a design format. I hope to have my student focus more on that this year for a cleaner looking paper.
ReplyDeleteTracy Collin's presentation was wonderful. I wish I could have recorded the entire session and shown that to my students. I love that he took the time and energy to redesign several of our pages.
ReplyDeleteEric Gutierrez
Cerritos, Calif.