Perfect game, perfect pages
What a delight to open my Virginian-Pilot this morning to find this masterpiece by Buddy Moore:
That’s a fabulous photo, designed with a little interaction with the page nameplate. A terrific headline (including a pun — you guys know what a sucker I am for puns). Two wonderful pullouts down low, including one on the history of perfect games and another on the incredible outfield catch by Dewayne Wise to preserve the win (and yet another pun in the text).
And even the ad across the bottom wasn’t ugly today!
Like a lot of people, we’re in love with this pitch-by-pitch diagram masterminded by Steve Layton of the Chicago Tribune:
The Tribune’s Josh Crutchmer writes at SportsDesigner:
There were about four of us who had the same reaction as soon as the 27th out went up on the board: “Every pitch, to every batter, with every result, no cutting corners.”
Steve Layton, our senior graphics artist, immediately started building a shell, and Chad Yoder and Jonathon Berlin started pulling the data. My role was to give Steve the space to pull it off and make the rest of the page work.
Once we got the data and players oriented correctly, the design was rather repetitive and tedious. One of those deadline graphics made possible by a 1 p.m. game instead of a 7 p.m. game. Steve’s total time spent getting it all right was 6-7 hours.
I’m a little partial to the tab version, because the color adds a lot, in my opinion.
Steve’s work is fabulous — always has been, really. Working with him and observing his sports graphic work was one of the big highlights of my three years at the Tribune in the late 1990s.
You can see a bunch of perfect game sports fronts, A1 pages and graphics at SportsDesigner. Check it out here.
July 24th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
My only minor complaint about the graphic is that it is slightly confusing in how it should be read. At first I tried to read it from left to right, but realized quickly that didn’t work.
Then I tried to read down each column, but realized after reading the intro and then hitting the fifth inning that that method was also incorrect.
Finally I realized you do indeed read down, but only halfway before moving back up and to the right.
Just a little bit awkward and I wish they would have maybe spread the graphic over two pages so it could have been twice as wide and a little less cumbersome to read. There are other possibilities as well, but as I said, it didn’t take that long to figure out.
Also, not being a real baseball aficionado, I had trouble deciphering the G1, G3, F7, etc. annotations. I decided this must be traditional shorthand for fielders who scored the outs, but I would have liked to have seen that in the key somewhere.
But again, this might be more easily understood by more dedicated baseball fans.
All in all a wonderful effort, despite my little quibbles.
July 24th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Just went over to Sportsdesigner and saw that the broadsheet version of the graphic was indeed designed to read completely from left to right as I mentioned above. Wish that could have translated from the broadsheet to the tab perhaps over two pages, but maybe space didn’t allow for it.
July 24th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
God love Buddy — that man is a genius and an utter joy to work with. That page is perfection!
July 25th, 2009 at 8:03 am
Buddy Moore’s piece in Virginian-Pilot is great. The fact that its a perfect game makes this perfect. But it also shows why newspapers are going under. Question: Why is the Virginian-Pilot putting resources into something that only effects Chicago region. Wouldn’t the wire coverage be enough for Virginia and use this talented artist for something more local. Unless, and I don’t know this, Mark Buehrle is from Virigina. Then its a different story.