Conference championship game fronts
Here’s a look at how various papers played Sunday’s AFC and NFC championship games.
We’ll start with the folks in Arizona, where the Cardinals ended what we’re told is the second-longest streak without a championship in all of U.S. professional sports — the longest being the Chicago Cubs, of course.
Today’s Arizona Republic explodes out of the racks with news of Sunday’s huge victory over the Eagles:
Normally, we’d advise against using a static trophy shot, but hey — this is the first one of those that Cardinals fans have ever seen. So it’s OK.
The Photoshop crafting of the header is quite nice. Republic AME Tracy Collins says it was designed by Bill Pliske, Luke Knox and Joey Kirk. The rest of the page was designed by Chris George.
By contrast, the Daily Star of Tucson was much more subdued. Great headline, though:
That’s Bryan Blumer with the design.
Moving to the Pennsylvania side of the country, this was our favorite front-page Steelers treatment today:
That’s the Beaver County Times, a small, 39,000-circulation daily just outside of Pittsburgh. Christopher Ream designed the page. In particular, we like the little Obama cutout, three-quarters of the way down.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette produced a very solid front today. We think the AFC logo up top was awfully deep, though, creating perhaps too much white space in the far upper right and left corners:
Nice, nice arrangement of the four sticks of type down low. Note, too, this is the first paper we’ve looked at so far today that used an action shot, as opposed to a celebration shot.
Also: What luck that the PG’s front-page advertiser used Steelers colors today.
The Tribune-Review front had less impact than the Post-Gazette’s, but the the “Superfine” headline makes us smile:
Harrisburg also went with a celebration shot. We think that’s a celebration shot. Big Ben might, in fact, be mugging that poor teammate:
We like the headline — a reference to the sixth trip to the Super Bowl the Steelers earned Sunday — and especially the contrasting two-column shot of Eagles QB Donovan McNabb. Some kind of balance is important for the Patriot-News — it’s much closer to Philadelphia than it is to Pittsburgh.
Moving on to the losing cities — and our condolences go out to you folks — our favorite front today was the Philadelpha Daily News. These guys are always inventive and fresh, and today was no exception:
That’s an outstanding photo, a fabulous headline and a really good design — given that the DN coudln’t possibly go without major promos for Tuesday’s inauguration.
The Philly edition of Metro, too, used a nice shot of a disappointed Donovan McNabb and a wonderful headline:
The top half of this tab page is truly great. The bottom half: Not so much. We’d point out the impact of the McNabb shot is lost with that montage of images.
Sometimes, you can do more with less. This would have been one of those times.
We were truly puzzled by today’s Philadelphia Inquirer. The Eagles loss is on page one, but only at the very bottom — and with what appears to be an anaysis piece:
Was there, perhaps, a Spadea or wrap around today’s front that we didn’t see at the Newseum? Or did the Inky make a decision to dump the losing Eagles story from the front and emphasize the walk-up to the inauguration?
The Inquirer is one of those papers where we have no contacts at all. If anyone there would like to enlighten us, we’re all ears.
We’ll close with two Baltimore papers. The Sun, as you’d imagine, blew out the Ravens’ loss with a splashy headline and dejected players walking off the field:
Anthony Conroy is the designer for this one.
This page has a bit too much color in it for our tastes, but we’re aware of the Sun’s increased volume level these days; most likely, we’re simply not accustomed to it. Green, blue and orange ad across the bottom sure doesn’t help.
Design-wise, we’d suggest killing that little black box plus thin, horizontal mug at the bottom left of the main photo. That seems to add unnecessary clutter to the front.
And here is Baltimore’s free daily tab, The Examiner, played it:
We understand the choice of photo — Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco threw three interceptions Sunday — but there might have been a better choice than this particular shot. It’s just not dramatic at all. It also seems poorly-shaped for the space devoted to the story.
Might we have looked for a horizontal photo? Or, better yet, put Flacco on the right and stacked the headline down the left?