Charles Apple

Matt Mansfield tweeted today:

A fun little line atop the Virginian-Pilot smirks at the snow.

Yeah, I guess. That little nameplate gimmick doesn’t bother me. But I’ve seen that sort of thing done so many times — I’ve been asked to produce art like that myself, four or five times over the years — that it doesn’t impress me. Unless it’s done in a particularly clever or different way.

This one is nice and clean. I like the photo much better, though. Wonderful stuff by staffer Preston Gannaway (Who I’ve never heard of. Hmm. Must be new.)

I’m not crazy at all about the headline. Why? Because I’m old enough to remember when that same headline was used on a previous area snowstorm:

The whoa thing worked a lot better with a photo of horses. I’m not quite sure why the Pilot would have resurrected it today.

That page was designed by Julie Elman and won an SND award, as I recall. I don’t have the year, off the top of my head.

Average daily circulation of the Virginian-Pilot is 164,454.

Much, much better today, I think, was the front page of the Pilot’s arch-rival Daily Press of Newport News, Va., circulation 81,241.

And yes, they, too, used a piled-snow art gimmick on their nameplate. I think the Pilot’s snow gimmick works better than the Daily Press‘. But I don’t think either was necessary.

I love the photo and the snowflake bullets. I also love the art on the downpage story, which uses the logo for the Hampton Coliseum to display faces of famous sports and music stars who performed there.

Another really nice weather front today was by the Observer of Fayetteville, N.C., circulation 59,558, who also played on the emptiness of local streets and played its nice art very, very large:

The Observer has been on a whale of a roll lately — this is the third time in less than a week I’ve featured its front page. It might be worth adding them to your list of papers to keep an eye on.

Less outstanding visually but very amusing is the cold-weather photo on the left side of today’s Boston Herald:

Please ignore the headline on the right. That’s a pun even I wouldn’t attempt.

The picture is by staffer Mark Garfinkel. The Herald circulates 138,260 papers daily.

The Sun Sentinel of Ft. Lauderdale celebrated the traditional week off before the Super Bowl with a little cheesecake:

Cheerleaders playing tug-of-war on the beach. Ahem. The picture was the result of a grueling assignment, I’m sure, by staffer Michael Francis McElroy. Average daily circulation for the Sun-Sentinel is 153,563.

Matt Mansfield also tweeted this morning:

Great to see the Plain Dealer using a Chris Morris illustration on its front page today.

Absolutely! Chris recently left the employ of the beleaguered Las Vegas Sun. His caricature work is some of the best anywhere, though:

Find Chris’ portfolio here. Average daily circulation for the Plain Dealer is 271,180.

The Forum of Fargo, N.D. — circulation 50,131 — also went with a black-and-white illustration on page one today.

Notice how the sparing use of red and the neutral-colored background texture accentuate the black-and-white art by staffer Troy Becker. Nicely done.

And this, too, was an interesting graphic gimmick on the front of today’s Dispatch of Casa Grande, Ariz., circulation 9,000:

The Daily Progress of Charlottesville, Va. — circulation 28,697 — led today with an aerial photo of the farm where the body of a college student was found recently:

Two aerial photos, a map and a mugshot made for a nice infographic treatment. Notice how the designer went out of his or her way to keep everything as clean as possible. It’s easy to junk things up when you have this many moving pieces.

For some reason, I found myself drawn to a lot of Virginia pages today. Here’s yet another: The Times-Dispatch of Richmond. Yeah, they stripped a small snow photo across the top. That was nice, but what caught my eye was the big illustrative pie chart by staffer John Ownby:

Right away, you can see one of my primary beefs with pie charts: While it’s easy to produce a pie chart itself — after all, the tool is built into Adobe Illustrator — what’s not so easy is to work out the labeling. Those three large pieces are no problem and the value for the yellow piece is easy to see as well. But see how awkward the placing is for the other eight slices?

Still, it’s an interesting and engaging chart. Plus it and the story refer to an interesting online “you be the governor” interactive game that allows you to try to balance the state’s budget. Find that here.

And while we’re on the subject of pie charts: Do you think this one afront today’s Bee of Modesto, Calif., is a little cheesy?

The chart/illustration by staffer Brian Harris is nicely done. The page itself, no so much — but only because there’s a little too much happening here: The big cheese, the vignette of the man in the upper right, the montage of cheesy items down the right side and the illustrated timeline down the left.

I’d suggest taking the How it’s made bit inside. Or, at the very least, removing the top photo from that bit, which is sort of redundant because of the little guy up top. Less is more, Modesto.

The Modesto Bee circulates 78,001 papers daily.

My favorite illustrated page-one financial piece of the weekend, though, was this one in the Saturday edition of West Hawaii Today of Kailua, circulation 13,594:

I’ve seen Monopoly boards, play money and charts galore. But this is the first time I’ve seen this particular idea.

Unfortunately, it’s uncredited here. So for all I know, it could be stock art or something. I hope it was staff-generated, though. I like it a lot.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 1:59 pm and is filed under A look at the day's fronts, News design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.