Charles Apple

Before we dig into today’s front pages — and, believe me, there were a bazillion of them, thanks to the folks at the Newseum — let’s look at some infographics published today to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

The anniversary of the actual landing, of course, is tomorrow, July 20. But many papers chose to take advantage of the bigger Sunday newshole by running anniversary stories today.

The Houston Chronicle — the hometown paper of NASA’s mission control — had Alberto Cuadra and Jay Carr work up this huge piece today that compares elements of the Apollo moonwalks with what’s planned for the Constellation missions (click for a larger view):

It’s immaculately drawn of course — as you’d expect from the folks at the Chronicle. It’s fun to see the two sets of hardware compared. Putting the lunar surface into what appears to be a sandbox was a nice touch.

We also like the nice, clean color-coded timeline across the bottom. Just perfect.

Download a PDF version here.

The Orlando Sentinel took a similar approach with a piece that ran on the jump page of its A1 anniversary story today (Click for a larger view):

That’s the work of Shiniko R. Floyd.

Bill Pitzer of the Charlotte Observer took a by-the-numbers approach:

With all that text to deal with, Bill wisely kept his visuals as simple as possible.

Dan Garrow of the Wilmington, Del., News Journal produced this diagram showing the moon suits that were manufactured — by hand, no less — at nearby ILC Dover (Yes, this one’s clickable, too):

And Caroline M. Hirt of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review built this montage of images to illustrate various technological spin-offs from the Apollo program that have benefited us today:

That graphic, too, is clickable for a larger view. Or, download a PDF here.

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FRONT PAGES

Today’s Apollo 11 fronts can be divided into four main categories:

1. Folks who used either the iconic photo of Buzz Aldrin looking at his checklist or the iconic photo of Buzz Aldrin in front of the flag.
2. Folks who dug a little deeper to find other vintage NASA images to lead with.
3. Folks who led their package with a local person who worked on the mission or equipment used in Apollo 11.
4. Folks who tried to build a montage of images to illustrate the moon mission.

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BUZZ CHECKING HIS CHECKLIST

We’ve written at length about the famous photo of Buzz Aldrin that’s actually altered from the original frame (NASA handout on the left; original photo on the right)

And like we told you Friday, Buzz is actually reading his checklist which is printed on his sleeve. Just in case you wondered what he was doing here.

Because the original photo has been altered, we were hoping papers would stay away from using it this year. But because this is one of the most recognizible photos in the history of the world, many papers used it anyway:

You see Hartford, Conn., on the bottom left. But on the row right above it and two over to the right — with the big word “Sunday” across the top — is Danbury, Conn. One wonders what Connecticut residents think when they see two local papers with the same photo on the front. This will come up a time or two again, today.

A few of these pages are quite good, we’ll point out. The Times of Gainesville, Ga. — circulation 19,400 — was one of the cleanest pages using this photo:

Nice use of white space, clean typography and a tint box that doesn’t fight with the warm grey lunar surface.

The Kansas City Star used the photo to head up a package about how Apollo was the last really big project in America, comparing it to the Hoover dam in the 1930s, Mount Rushmore in the 30s and 40s, the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, the Interstate highway system in the 1950s and the Gateway Arch in the 1960s:

An intriguing notion. Find Rick Montgomery’s story here.

The Cincinnati Enquirer led with this photo, but with it, they kind of buried their lede. The centerpiece story today was a very, very rare interview with Cincinnati resident Neil Armstrong himself:

If you’re interviewing Armstong, wouldn’t you want to find a led photo of him instead? We would. So we’re puzzled.

An excerpt of John Johnson’s interview:

Q: You are sometimes perceived as being out of the public eye, and some people have incorrectly referred to you as reclusive. Why do you think that is? How do you perceive yourself in terms of being visible in the community?

A: That is a viewpoint created by the press because I have not given individual interviews for many years.

Q: Three words that best describe you:

A: Very lucky fellow.

Find it here.

And the tiny Carroll County Times of Westminster, Md., did exactly what we were most afraid of: They led with a headline that refers to all the wack jobs out there who think man didn’t really land on the moon in 1969:

In fact, the story is about a curator of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum who works toward debunking all the conspiracy theories. But you wouldn’t know that from the headline. Boo, hiss.

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BUZZ SALUTING THE FLAG

A large number of papers bypassed that famous Buzz Aldrin shot and instead used another famous shot — the one of Buzz and the flag. You might recall when MTV used it as part of its logo:

There are actually two shots like this on the original roll of film shot on the moon. On the left — which was shot first — Buzz is saluting the flag. You can barely see the tips of his gloved fingers in front of his visor:

In the picture on the right — the one you’re more familiar with — Buzz has turned slightly toward Neil to see if he’s snapped the picture yet. As we mentioned the other day, if you look real close at Buzz’ helmet, you can see him, turning his head within his helmet, peering back at Neil Armstrong:

A bunch of folks used this picture today and many used it quite well:

As we get to the bottom row, though, you can begin to see a few papers struggled using this as their lede art. Both St. Joseph, Mo. (bottom left) and Shreveport, La. (bottom right) — really needed a vertical photo. They made this one work by leaving the vertical crop very, very loose. Which looks odd.

The paper in the middle of the bottom row — Monroe, La. — Also used a loose crop but could have in fact zoomed in quite a bit. It would have made the image seem larger and would have removed the dead space at the bottom of the picture.

(And, we’ll point out, the page in the center and the right of the last row are both from Louisiana: the Monroe News-Star and the Shreveport Times. It’s some kind of weird geographical magnet, perhaps, making this happen.)

The Rome, Ga., News-Tribune also had a problem making this picture fit into their package:

That’s a series of awkward fits — the flag into the hole between the intro and the story, the huge dead space below the astronaut.

Lesson: If you’re working with a horizontal photo, let it be horizontal. Run it large in a horizontal space. Instead of trying to carve out room for a stick of copy alongside it, run the copy below. Rome might look at the Palm Beach front, in particular, for how they might have made this page work better.

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OTHER VINTAGE NASA IMAGES

A number of papers dug a little deeper into the NASA archive — or was it into the batch of photos the Associated Press moved? — to build their Sunday fronts.

That weird geographical coincidence thing we’ve been talking about? Here it is again, with the Baltimore Sun and the News-Post of Frederick, Md.:

The photo is of Buzz Aldrin coming down the ladder at the start of the moonwalk.

The Telegram of Worcester, Mass., used that same photo but added some value to the package by using little pointer boxes to label equipment developed or manufactured locally that was used by Apollo 11 astronauts:

The Express-News of San Antonio found this shot of Buzz fiddling with a seismometer the astronauts left on the moon to measure any possible moonquake activity:

The Nortwest Herald of Crystal Lake, Ill., dug even deeper, pulling out a photo of Buzz Aldrin standing in front of one of the lunar lander’s legs:

An interesting choice. But the photoshop work — nestling all the way up against Buzz as it does — is a bit obtrusive. We’d have suggested trying something else.

The cape’s hometown paper, Florida Today, went with a photo of the lunar module returning to the mothership the day after the landing and moonwalk:

It seems odd to use a headline containing the phrase “Moon landing” with a photo of a craft that’s just taken off from the moon.

Kristin Lenz of the Washington Post used that same photo to very dramatic effect on the cover of today’s Outlook section:

And the tiny Daily Record of Roswell, N.M. — circulation 11,700 — couldn’t choose between a shot of the lunar module before the landing or something showing rocket science pioneer Robert Goddard. So they kind of went with both:

The result, as you can see, has little visual impact on the page. Better to choose one picture and let it sing.

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MONTAGES

Speaking of that, we don’t feel that montages are particularly effective as lede art, for that very reason. It’s almost as if the editors can’t decide what photo should be the No. 1 art on the page. “So what the hell, let’s just use all of ‘em.”

On the left, the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Ill., simply ran too many photos. Pick one and make it much bigger:

In the middle, the Deseret News of Salt Lake City built a photoshop motage of three photos. Again, one would have worked. Or one with a smaller secondary shot. But the photoshop work is a bit much — particularly since they use so much photoshop in the skyline.

And the Vindicator of Youngstown, Ohio, kind of went crazy today with all sorts of art: There’s a nicely cropped vertical of the launch, a horizontal of Buzz on the moon, a closeup of a footprint an official NASA handout portrait of Neil, a portrait of a local guy, a vintage pagee one, two mug shots…

Whew! Too much art. The Vindicator would find their front much more powerful today if they had exercised a little more discretion in their photo edit.

We feel like the Tampa Tribune, too, ran too many pictures out front today. Did we really need to see portraits of the three astronauts on the front — especially when a candid shot of them in quarantine after their return appears below?

By the way, Tampa used that footprint photo upside-down. The sequence of four footprints shot by Buzz Aldrin:

In fact, we’ve seen this shot upside-down so often today that we’re wondering if the Associated Press or someone sent it out that way. We no longer have access to the AP raw feed, so we can’t tell.

Read more about this photo in our Saturday post.

Houston ran a montage of images, too, focusing on their big centerpiece story today about how Houston grew into the headquarters for NASA’s manned space effort:

There’s a lot of good material there. But the way it’s designed — and the tightness of the design — makes for a lot of visual clutter.

While poking around on the Chronicle’s web site today, though, we found this interesting juxtaposition of two story links. Together, they make a powerful statement on the state of NASA today, compared to 40 years ago:

Heh…

The folks in Oklahoma City wanted to evoke the memories of watching the moonwalk on an old console television. So what did they do? They built a photoshop montage showing just that:

Very interesting. But it would have worked a lot better without the images in the background.

If you have to run a montage, you might approach it like the Register-Guard of Eugene, Ore. They drew a grid and ran them in neat little columns:

That’s much cleaner. We like that page a lot — despite the fact that the damn footprint is still upside down.

Lesson: When editing photos, less is better.

Fewer but larger photos. Works nearly every time.

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MOONSCAPES

A few papers chose lede art of the moon itself. We like the crop the folks in Richmond used, but because of the direction the sunlight is hitting the craters, we think the shot works better rightside-up, like on the front of today’s L.A. Daily News:

Although the Earth rising over the moon is an image we associate more strongly with Apollo 8, Apollo 11 did indeed shoot a series of Earthrise photos while in lunar orbit.

Oakland, we feel, crowded the space above Earth with too much text. The treatment on the right — by the Daily Telegram of Temple, Texas, works much better:

The Daily Telegram has an average daily circulation of about 19,400. So score one for the little guys.

Our beef with today’s Newport News Daily Press front is that the JPG and PDF copies we pulled from the Newseum showed a lot of blue in that moon picture, making it look more like the Earth. We’ll bet it looked a lot better in print:

Pensacola devoted only a strip above the nameplate to Apollo, but did it very effectively.

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THOSE TERRIFIC LOCAL ANGLES

A number of papers used their Sunday centerpieces to focus on local folks who worked on equipment or teams that helped put Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon.

Our favorite of these was the Telegraph of Macon, Ga.:

Find the story — about a local man who worked in mission control during the mission — here.

The Tribune-Democrat of Johnstown, Pa., went with a straightforward approach for an interview with a local native who was a contractor coordinator for NASA in Cape Canaveral:

We like the lede package quite a lot. We think all that decoration of the nameplate, however, was not needed. It only detracts from the page.

The Courier Times of Levittown, Pa., ran a story about the giant centrifuge where astronauts trained in Warminster, Pa.:

Our only quibble is the label atop the story. “The New Frontier” seems odd, given the landing happened 40 years ago. We’d suggest something like “Apollo 11 40th anniversary.”

The Advertiser of Lafayette, La., interviewed Harvey LeBlanc, a Boeing engineer who helped design the second stage of the Saturn V rocket:

We like these approaches that use fresh art of the local folks or can incorporate period art of them in action, 40 years ago. Lafayette, for example, used one of these on the front and posted both on its web site:

Along those same lines, check out this vintage NASA photo of the crew of the aircraft carrier Hornet pulling the Apollo 11 capsule aboard after its return to earth on July 23, 1969:

See the frogman on the left, with the red pouch attached to his waist? That’s Wes Chesser, interviewed in today’s Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Va.:

Here’s the lede on that story by Edie Gross:

Wes Chesser figures he and his dive mates spent about 90 minutes bobbing in the ocean, tethered to the Apollo 11 space capsule after it splashed down in the Pacific on July 24, 1969.

The spacecraft’s astronauts had already been whisked away to the nearby USS Hornet, where they were meeting with President Nixon, albeit behind a barrier so they didn’t expose the president to “moon germs.”

Chesser, part of the Navy team responsible for retrieving Apollo 11, had to wait in the water until the president flew off.

“I don’t remember this, but somebody said we did play ‘King of the Spacecraft,’” Chesser recalled of the long wait in choppy seas.

And how exactly is that game played?

“Whoever can stay on the longest wins.”

That’s a terrific use of the NASA archives. Sometimes, you get very lucky.

The Times-Telegraph of Tyler, Texas, led with the AP-issue vintage NASA shot of the lunar module we’ve seen earlier. The designer might have been better off instead using the photo of a local man who worked in mission control during Apollo 11:

The Telegraph is also selling reproductions of its front page from July 21, announcing in magenta ink that man had set foot on the moon:

Now, that’s a headline that jumps out at you!

And we have to give our big frowny-face of the day to the Sunday News of Manchester, N.H. We understand why they didn’t lead with the local art — a man holding a lapel pin just isn’t very compelling:

What really got our goat, though, was the cutline on that NASA shot. No, that’s not Neil Armstrong’s boot. That’s Buzz Aldrin.

Granted, the cutline says this photo is part of an exhibit at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord. Perhaps it’s mislabled there at the museum. But wrong is wrong.

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OUR FAVORITE FRONT PAGES

We saved our best for last. Here are our favorite Apollo 11 treatments of the day, in no particular order.

We’re not familiar with the Sunday Hour of Norwalk, Conn. But their huge, magazine cover-like treatment of this stark photo was striking:

Very nice. And the typography is well-done, too. It’s a shame they missed the bottom inch or so from the photo. We also find it odd that two of the three stories on the front are Apollo stories, yet one isn’t part of the package.

We immediately fell in love with the dramatic photo on the front of the Journal & Courier of West Lafayette, Ind.:

What better way to illustrate a story about Purdue graduate Neil Armstrong than showing the moon peering over the shoulder of the bronze statue of Armstrong on the Purdue campus. The wonderful photo was shot by John Terhune.

Earlier, we presented a big batch of pages built using a famous photo of Buzz Aldrin and the U.S. flag. We held back three pages, however, that we felt used this photo to particularly good advantage.

One, not surprisingly, is the San Jose Mercury News:

One reason you’ll find the Merc at the top of nearly everyone’s list of best-designed papers is because the Merc gets all the details just perfect: The perfect choice of photos and the perfect crops. A perfect balance of text and white space. All the typography is perfect.

Today’s Orange County Register caught our eye for the interplay between the Apollo package and the L-shaped Walter Cronkite refer wrapping around it:

Normally, we’d urge folks to stay away from an L-shaped component like this. But as you can see, it works very well here. You won’t pull this off often, though, so be careful. When you do, though, it’s a home run.

And then, there’s today’s Orlando Sentinel. Remember earlier, when we were talking about the two different frames that exist of Buzz Aldrin and the flag? The Sentinel went out of their way to dig up the other one; the on where he’s saluting:

And they ran it huge. Even with the loose crop, this would have tremendous impact in a newspaper rack. And keep in mind, the Sentinel is the home paper for a lot of folks who work at Cape Canaveral now and who have retired from NASA.

The rest of the page is very fine, as well. The start of the Q&A with Aldrin is cleanly handled, as is the vintage liftoff photo. Our quibble with that, though, is that the Sentinel asks specifically about July 20. But the photo shows July 16.

The page is a total winner. Despite containing possibly one of the largest, most obtrusive A1 advertisements I’ve ever seen. Egads! What an obstacle!

See this dramatically-cropped horizontal photo atop today’s Charlotte Observer?

At several points during the two-hour-and-s0me-change moonwalk, Armstong and Aldrin turned around and shot a series of photos from a single spot, creating a panorama of pictures.

Observer photo editor Gary O’Brien went back and stitched together one of the series Armstrong took of the lunar module and the landing site. Here’s the print version again. Click for a larger view:

The online version, though, is interactive though 360 degrees. Find that here.

Gary is well-known for his panorama work, our Observer pal Mike Homan points out. Read more about it here and see more samples here.

You may remember we’ve been watching the Plain Dealer of Cleveland all week. They’ve been running a top-of-the-page treatment all week that includes a tiny graphic, retracing the path Apollo 11 took to the moon.

Here’s today’s installment. Click for a larger view:

And here’s the entire page, for the record:

The best use of the Apollo 11 Earthrise photos, however, was by the American-Statesman of Austin, Texas:

We love the dramatic crop on the photo the label hed: Moonstruck. What an elegant way to commemorate Apollo 11.

Among the very cool things Austin laid on its readers today was this lunar landing simulator game. Normally, we stay away from online games. But this one was relatively easy to play, yet not easy to land successfully:

Yes, we spent way too much time playing this game today, which is why we’re so late posting. Here’s the link. Prepare to get nothing else done for a couple of hours.

This next one is one of the cooler things we’ve seen all week, and from a tiny, tiny paper:

The day after the first moonwalk, the East Oregonian of Pendleton, Ore., asked seven local boys if they’d like to be astronauts and go to the moon.

Forty years later, the paper managed to track down three of the seven.

An excerpt:

Andy Samples
“Heck yeah,” Samples declared. “The pay would be a lot better than I’m making now - and a lot less hassle, I’ll tell you that.” He was 5 at the time NASA launched Apollo 11. Now at 45, he has three children and he and his wife Lori Samples will celebrate their 16th wedding anniversary on July 24. The couple opened an automotive shop in August of 2006, in Puyallup, Wash.

We might point out the East Oregonian has an average daily circulation of 9,000. That’s small.

And that’s a damn nice page. Especially for a paper that size.

And finally, we wanted to say how much we loved the Journal of Sioux City, Iowa, which observed a different anniversary entirely today:

We remember that crash very well, but we had no idea that was 20 years ago today. Kudos to Sioux City for choosing just the right photo and for playing in in a big, emotional way.

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We’ll leave you today with one of the coolest things we’ve ever seen.

Lots of boys growing up in the 1960s had G.I. Joe action figures. That’s the very toy that inspired the creation of the word action figure, in fact. In the 1960s, who wanted to see a little boy playing with dolls?

And any space-happy kid just had to have the G.I. Joe astronaut and Mercury space capsule. I sure got a lot of play out of mine.

Well, this one guy has taken his boyhood dreams a step further than any of the rest of us might dare — he’s built a scale Redstone rocket booster designed to launch his G.I. Joe capsule.

Not into space, perhaps. But pretty effin’ high.

And yeah: This guy means business:

That’s one serious model rocket.

He’s intent on flying not just the plastic capsule, but also the G.I. Joe figure as well:

He has the launch part down:

But he has a little trouble with steering and landings…

…with the results you’d expect:

Don’t just take our word for it, though. Check out the video:

Find the Mercury Joe web site here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Graphics, News design, Photojournalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.