A big day for U.S. Olympians on page one
We’ll streamline our look at Olympics-related front pages today by focusing only on the very best or notable Olympics front pages, or the pages from which we might extract a lesson or two.
The big story for Canadians today was a gold medal for speedskater Marianne St-Gelais, who happened to turn 20 Wednesday as well.
The Canadian front page — among those posted to the Newseum this morning — with the most impact was this one by le Journal de Montreal, circulation 225,427:
Y’know, as a guy from a paper that didn’t run a lot of text over the foreground of photos, I’d rather not see that. But I understand some papers take more of a magazine or approach on their fonts. And that includes tabloids like this one.
Given that, this is how you design page one. St-Gelais nearly leaps off the page with glee. I defy you to look at her and not smile. The photo, sadly, is identified only as from QMI.
Nearly as nice is today’s le Soleil, circulation 87,168, featuring a picture from Reuters:
I like the fact that the headline doesn’t overlap the subject of the photo. I think a more condensed hed might have been nice for this space, however.
My favorite Canadian front of the day, however, is this poster treatment by the Calgary Herald, circulation 121,800:
Ah. Near perfect. In fact, even Calgary’s customary corner web refer isn’t quite as obtrusive today.
My Awful Crop of the Day award goes to La Presse of Quebec, circulation 214,953, for this debacle:
OK, guys, I understand you have a template from which you build every day. And I understand the lead package leaves room for a horizontal photo every day — or, at least, it has during these Winter Games.
But if that’s the case, then you need to photo-edit for a horizontal picture.
This is basically a vertical shot — by staffer AndrĂ© Pichette — shoehorned into a very horizontal space. And the results require extensive cutout work and leave lots of dead space on either side of the foreground.
Arguably the day’s bigger story, however, was the trio of stunning gold medals won Wednesday by team USA, especially injured downhill skier Lindsey Vonn. The Globe and Mail of Toronto dutifully documented this with a centerpiece made of three vertically-cropped shots of the U.S. winners:
Two of those photos are from Reuters and the one on the right is from Getty. This gang approach works very well here. Hold that thought, because we’ll return to it in a few minutes.
The Globe and Mail circulates 332,764 copies daily.
The hometown Vancouver Sun — which I picked on quite a bit last weekend and earlier this week, and rightfully so — tried a similar approach, but not quite as successfully. The Brady Bunch-like layout didn’t quite have the impact of the Globe and Mail, despite the emphasis on the U.S. flags:
The Sun gets bonus points for giving credit where credit is due today. But they lose bonus points for allotting front-page space to a comedian. I mean, really.
Those are three Getty images and one from PNG. The nice shot of St-Gelais at the bottom was by Reuters. Average daily circulation for the Sun is 176,690.
You could argue this is four or five days late, but I like the graphic package on the front of today’s Toronto Star, circulation 335,680:
The luge photo is by Shaun Botterhill of Getty Images. The graphic, however, is by Star staffer Brian Hughes. A closer view:
Nice and simple. There’s no detail here that you don’t need to see. I’d like to have known just a little more about the vertical scale here. But still, it works for me. Nicely done.
While nearly everyone south of the 49th parallel focused on the astounding Ms. Vonn, the Press Democrat of Santa Rosa, Calif. — circulation 78,022 — highlighted another gold medalist, Carrot Top snowboarder Shaun White:
Oooh. Nice picture by Mark Terrill of the Associated Press. And an extra-clean, nicely vertical play by the PD.
Many U.S. editors continued to play their local Olympians — win or lose — out front. One of my favorites is this action-filled closeup of the third U.S. gold medal-winner, speed skater Shani Davis:
That’s RedEye, the commuter tab of the Chicago Tribune, of course. The photo is from Getty.
Fairbanks, Alaska, native Kikkan Randall finished in the top eight in classic sprint Wednesday. Her hometown paper — the Daily News-Miner, circulation 14,761 — celebrated with a big front-page package:
I show it to you for a couple of reasons. First, it wasn’t really necessary to jam that text into the photo. Those are two large sticks of text on the right. Jump another four or five inches of copy and stack all the headlines to the right of the photo, above the story.
Secondly, please don’t ghost images behind stories. It affects readability and it does not add to the visual sophistication of your page.
I hope the designer — if he or she is out there — doesn’t feel smacked down by this critique, though. It’s still fundamentally a nice page. Two minutes of art direction and fifteen minutes of fixes would have made this very, very nice.
OK, remember when I approved of the gang-of-three approach taken by the Toronto Globe and Mail? A number of U.S. papers tried similar ideas on page one today, but only two pulled it off well. The first was the American-Statesman of Austin, Texas, circulation 140,602:
Notice that instead of verticals — which worked well for Toronto — Austin went with horizontals. Which also worked very well, obviously. All three are Associated Press pictures.
I like the Gold Rush headline on the right and the fat cutlines. It’s a shame we couldn’t have found a way to match up each copy block with each photo.
I like this next one even better, although it, too, has its flaws:
The text matches up with each AP photo, which is nice. The designer — or photo editor, or both — answered the severe horizontal spaces with slightly looser crops, which worked out very well here.
My only complaint: The header across the top of the package is a little clunky. How about something with a much smaller ring logo and a one-line label?
Most U.S. papers that put the Winter Games out front today ran photos of Vonn. And for good reason: 20 years from now, you’ll remember the Vonn — a native of Burnsville, Minn. — as the star of the Vancouver games, just as you remember Franz Klammer as the star of Innsbruck in 1976 and Sara Hughes the star of Salt Lake City in 2002.
Naturally, her hometown papers blew it out best. The Star Tribune of Minneapolis — circulation 304,543 — built its front around a huge picture by staffer Brian Peterson and a story by its reporter in Vancouver, Rachael Bount:
Very nice, of course. But it also brings up a good point about sending staffers to events like the Winter Games.
I’ve been critical of papers — especially the hometown Vancouver papers — for not using staff art on page one. My suspicion, obviously, is that they’re not even staffing the Olympics. Which just horrifies me.
But it might be difficult to make a case for jumping through the hoops (or, rather, Olympic Rings) to get credentials and pay travel, lodging and overtime expenses to shoot staff art when the picture you end up with on A1 isn’t appreciably different from what you can get from the Associated Press:
That’s the News Tribune of Duluth — circulation 40,305 — making very nice use of a picture by the AP’s Gero Breloer.
Meanwhile, check out today’s Pioneer Press, just across the river from Minneapolis:
Wow! By far, that’s the best Olympics page of the day!
Ben Ramsden tells us he designed this page himself. He writes:
We knew if Vonn won the gold, we wanted to make a pretty big splash for our local girl. I conceptualized a look the night before with some file art and showed it to our editors. There are always good photos from the Olympics, so we couldn’t lose. They liked the idea, and — voilĂ ! — today’s front page.
Here’s the only thing: What do we do if she wins five gold medals? I guess we’ll just have to find out.
Seriously, it was just planning ahead and anticipating the result. This time it worked. Our sports cover was just as good.
Great work, dude.
The awesome picture is by Fabrice Coffrini of Getty. And, like the Strib, the Pioneer Press has a reporter in Vancouver: Tom Powers. Find today’s story here.
The Pioneer-Press circulates 185,220 copies daily.
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UPDATE:
Ben sent us the Pioneer Press‘ sports cover, designed by Nosh Munar:
Nosh built around a picture by Michael Kappeler of the Associated Press.
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And while the Pioneer Press paid for that A1 Getty image, the Star of Ventura, Calif., created probably the largest Vonn display of the day with a very similar shot by the aforementioned Gero Breloer of the AP:
Average daily circulation for the Star is 86,276.
Every day, Jon Fisch of the Seattle Times has been sending us that paper’s daily special section poster front. Today, he writes:
Rich Boudet took advantage of no ad on the cover and went sideways with his Day 6 cover.
Click for a larger view:
Oooooooooh, my goodness. I just became a huge fan of women’s skiing.
That’s gold-medal winner Vonn on the right, of course, and silver-medal winner Julia Mancuso on the left. The picture is by Clive Mason of Getty.
I did say you can click for a larger view, didn’t I? Just making sure.
Today was a day in which many of the biggest and most-respected U.S. dailies ran huge pictures — in some cases uncharacteristically huge pictures — of Vonn on page one. Click any of these for a larger look:
From left:
- The Boston Globe, circulation 264,105, with a four-column lede — the same Getty shot used by St. Paul.
- The Washington Post, circulation 582,844, running the AP pic by Breloer over three columns.
- The Los Angeles Times, circulation 657,467, with a four-column pic by staff photog Wally Skalij.
I don’t often show pages from the Wall Street Journal: its front page, as consistent as it is, has never been a great example of good visual journalism. But today, the Journal paired nice horizontal art of Vonn lying in the snow after her win with a file photo of her lying in the snow after her loss in Turin, four years ago:
Nicely done. The visual impact of the package is diminished somewhat by the tight closeness to the nuclear graphics, below. But still. Hey, we’ll see Alternative Story Forms on in place of What’s News before long.
Average daily circulation for the Journal is 2.02 million. Heh.
I’ll close with one last four-column front page photo — this one downpage, but on the front of the New York Times, circulation 927,851:
How about that. Two — count’ em two — four column photos on A1 of the New York Times.
And yes, you’re quite right: Good news design will create a clear visual hierarchy by varying the sizes of photos and the types of crops. Two huge four-column photos — both with very loose crops, as you see here — create way too much visual competition on the page and make it unclear where our eyes should go first.
But, y’know, they clash in a World’s Best Designed sort of way, I guess.