Charles Apple

For your holiday weekend reading pleasure, we thought we’d bring you a brief selection of unusual Friday fronts…

First up is this nice over-the-nameplate treatment by designer Joe Jayjack and photographer Justin Hayworth of the Des Moines Register:

Fireworks shots are nothing new on A1 this time of year, of course. The question becomes: How do you make it look different?

You probably don’t want to mess with the nameplate every day. But every once in a while, this kind of treatment can be quite nice. Especially if you handle it as well as this.

Huntsville, on the other hand, did something quite different. We’ve all seen diagrams that explain how fireworks work and how they get all those different colors. But the Times went with a page-one buyer’s guide approach:

Design director Tim Ball tells us:

I designed today’s front, but really, any credit should go to Jon Busdeker, one of our entertainment reporters, who tested all the fireworks and reported on them with a perfect, whimsical tone. I really just tried to match that a bit.

The safety primer — and details of what the law says about where you can and can’t set off fireworks in our circulation area — ran on the jump of our other fireworks story off the front page. We did ponder putting it out front, but didn’t get any calls about its placement, as far as I know.

Jon’s recommended best buys and duds are clearly marked, there on the front. Find the story online here. There’s even a video showing each firework — so you can check them out yourself — on the web site. The background music of Elvis Presley singing America the Beautiful is a nice touch.

Fireworks report card: Boom or bust?

Huntsville, by the way, has an average daily circulation of about 57,000.

Speaking of fireworks, our next designer is on fire: Jon Benedict of the Virginian-Pilot. This marks the third time in two weeks we’ve cited one of his exceptional pages here in the blog (previous mentions here and here).

The story was about an enormous traffic jam Thursday — perhaps one of the largest ever, here in Hampton Roads — that tied up traffic literally all day. It was a disaster — and it suggests that, if we ever had a big hurricane or something here — there could be a lot of folks caught, unable to evacuate:

Note the awesomely dramatic vertical crop on the lead photo. Note the decks and the map. Note the downplayed nameplate. Note the huge headline. (I know, I know: I’m a sucker for pun headlines. But this one works really well.)

We’ll run this one, Jon. But from here on, we’re billing you each time we mention you here in the blog.

Y’know, it wasn’t very long ago when we weren’t allowed to run photos of fallen soldiers returning from the Middle East. The law has been relaxed quite a bit recently, and Newsday today used such a photo to tremendous effect:

Credit the Associated Press with the picture. Nice headline placement and a wonderful crop by the folks at Newsday.

Speaking of pun headlines, we found this one a real LOL moment today:

That’s in Waterbury, Conn., you see. The punny hed was conceived by Bill O’Brien, we’re told.

Terrific photo, too, by the Republican-American’s Gina Vierra. The paper has an average daily circulation of about 51,000.

And we’ll close with another barrel of yuks — or is it yucks? — from Chicago’s RedEye:

With this front, apparently, RedEye’s designers are aiming for the respect of their peers. *Ba-dum Bump*

Meanwhile, we’ll be looking for any interesting or unusual July 4th treatments Saturday. We know we can count on something cool from the Herald of Rock Hill, S.C., for example. But do you have an interesting presentation in the works? Feel free to e-mail it to us tonight or tip us off so we can pull it up via the Newseum tomorrow:

chuckapple [at] cox.net

This entry was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under News design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.