Five inches on the local front of the Virginian-Pilot
You have to hand it to them: No one can produce eye-catching visuals quite like the Virginian-Pilot. No one.
An enormous thunderstorm — complete with waterspouts over the Chesapeake Bay — tore through the area last Thursday evening. The Pilot ran a story Friday, but how does it follow in Saturday’s paper? The news is old, but folks are still buzzing about the storm and all the rain.
Here’s how:
That’s a six-column by five-inch photomontage of stock art of water plus a light-blue gradient. And it’s built so that the page hedder appears to be floating away.
Click on this for a larger view:
On the right side is the actual content. In actual size, it shows the amount of rainfall measured at the oceanfront, downtown and at the airport. And the whole thing refers to a nice little story on page two.
The designer was Jon Benedict, I’m told.
He’s a new one. I’ve never met him, despite the fact that he came to the Pilot the same way I did — via the Des Moines Register. Jon is a 2004 graduate of the University of South Dakota.
Presentation team leader Paul Nelson tells me:
He was just looking to create something visually interesting on the page, saw the story inside and came up with that to support what he wanted to do.
No, you can’t do stuff like this every day. It takes up a lot of space. But, y’know, readers love to be caught off-guard by something that surprises and delights them. And if you can do that in a big way with visuals, then do it from time to time.
As Juan Antonio Giner likes to say: Visual caviar!
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:47 pm
I’d like to point out something else on the page. Is there no better word to use in place of the acronym for the lede headline than SOL? Sounds like those kids are S Out of Luck.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:37 pm
A good point, Josh. Sure ’nuff that acronym detracts from any page on which it appears.
But unfortunately for the Pilot, that’s what the state of Virginia calls ‘em here: SOL tests. My daughter took hers just a few weeks ago.
And yeah, we make that wisecrack all the time.
Personally, I’d like to see the state education folks change the name to WTF tests. But they never listen to me…