Charles Apple

Here’s a collection of my favorite fronts covering Barack Obama’s acceptance speech last night.

Added degree of difficulty: For a handful of papers, the final night of the Democratic National Convention coincided with the first game of the season for their local college teams.

We’ll start out with the host city’s Denver Post:

Very nice. Very elegant.

Managing editor for Design Damon Cain writes:

Matt Swaney and I worked on the basic page structure together, but as always here, there were others who weighed in and improved what we were doing, including Director of News Design Linda Shapley, photo editors Ken Lyons and Glenn Asakawa, and our editor Greg Moore.

Here’s today’s Rocky Mountain News:

Let’s move on to Obama’s home town, Chicago. Here’s today’s Tribune:

That’s one of the better Tribune fronts I’ve seen recently. The Trib folks tell me “a cast of thousands” was involved, and designer Ryan Smith was in the saddle last night.

Here’s the Sun-Times:

I can’t quite tell, but the rules running off the left side and the ellipses suggest this might be a wrap-around cover. If anyone at the Sun-Times would care to send me the full page, I’d be glad to post it.

—
UPDATE:
Eric White sent the cover. I’ll put it in a separate post.
—

And here’s RedEye:

A wonderful photo that does, indeed, capture Obama’s moment. Immaculate type placement. Just a perfect storm of a cover.

I asked Chris Courtney who did the honors. His response:

While I designed the cover, it was photo editor Chase Agnello-Dean’s perfect selection that made it work.

Like all of our best deadline work, it took about ten minutes from start to finish.

A few more outstanding treatments for you…

Here’s the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

AME for Presentation David Kordalski writes the front was produced by:

Lots of hands … main players were Emmet Smith, Michael Tribble, me, Jeff Greene (deputy director of photography) and Daryl Kannberg, DME.

Today’s Kansas City Star was designed by Charles Gooch. Charles writes:

Our goal was to be different and bold, so when we look back on our convention coverage we smile. We’ve got the same plans for McCain next week.

The front of today’s Merc, designed by Tiffany Pease:

But I don’t think it’s purely for sentimental reasons that my favorite front of the day was by the Virginian-Pilot’s Lori Kelley:

The photo is just stunning. I’d just love to see this paper in a rack:

Finally, my big laugh for the day…

So were these guys living up to their name with this front? Or was this just an unfortunate juxtaposition?

I hope, for the sake of balance, they’re planning a weasel or something to pair with next week’s Republican convention!

Also, read about an interesting DNC page published today by the San Antonio Express-News.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Photojournalism, Elections, Virginian-Pilot, News design, Newspapers, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.