NewsBeat

14 NewsBeat March 2018 must work together to make every story personable and an enjoyable read. "Front pages can be very difficult to design," Bri shared. "I usually start with 3 to 5 stories for a front page because I1m working with limited real estate. We lose a lot of space to the masthead at the top of the page and strip ad at the bottom.It can be a balancing act to make sure each story has enough text and art to assure the Page design was easier in the old days century ago, when newspapers printed their pages with nothing but black ink and included few pictures or illustrations, creating the average page layout was easy. The back shop would start with six extremely wide blank columns and fill them with as much body type as possible. Often the only story separation came in various headlines. Many of those headlines would be hyphenated in the strangest places. But computer composition, offset printing and a much more sophisticated audience has changed all that. Today1s page layouts must be hip, colorful, informative, truly interesting and capable of attracting the reader1s attention. The challenge of community newspaper design is more than just being contemporary and visually exciting. Today1s active lifestyle constantly pulls the newspaper reader1s attention away from even the shortest story. That1s why all well- planned page design includes numerous points of entry to redirect the reader back time and again into the story. These points of entries can include a large letter at the beginning of certain paragraphs, quote blocks, quizzes, sub-heads, supportive sidebars, photo cutline, graphs and illustrations to name a few. The more points of entry, the more likely a reader will read the article from beginning to end. I asked Briana (Bri) Harrell, our lead page designer, about the process she goes through to create strong page designs for our N'West Iowa REVIEW. The goals, she told me, are many. Well-crafted pages need to be attractive, interesting and informative as well as fair and balanced. The elements desired readership. "For the main package in this Most Moisture Ever example I had only stock snow photos to work with for art. At that time (March), snow didn't seem super relevant since the title was Most Moisture Ever, not Most Snow Ever. Therefor I wanted to make sure the headline and art were both portraying the same message, which is how I arrived at raindrops. "I used two shades of blue to add some visual interest to what could have been a very black and white page. To ensure the shape around the body copy was recognized as a raindrop, I gave the main package ample white space and I repeated the raindrop shape throughout the rest of the story. There is even a raindrop behind the large capital letter at the front of the story as a point of entry" "For the secondary stories, I used visuals to help break up the text and add balance to the page. These visuals included a map, a telling number and a teaser driving people online. "Not all front pages are created equal. We tend to make our sports section fronts less feature heavy, but many of the same design rules apply. You need to start your play of the main package above the fold and use headlines and subheads and other standard elements as points of entry. It is important to work your design so not to have butting headlines. "The main package on this sports cover has minimum but effective design A By PETER WAGNER

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