Portfolio Critiques

By Marissa Widdison
Brigham Young University

At 4:15 this afternoon, the smallish Glen Ellen room housed plenty of portfolios and owners, but only one "industry expert" to critique them! After a quick hallway recruit ("Hey, do you need any help?" "Yeah! C'mon in!") the lone New York Times representative was joined by a Salt Lake Tribuner and a USA Todayer. To accomodate all the portfolios, these three experts moved everyone into the foyer and tackled the session small-group style.

Designers from the Daily Herald, Annistan Star, The Voice and others sat around three round tables as phrases such as "white space" "capture the mood" "bold" and "too bold" were applied to their binders and looseleaf pages. Although the thought of being critiqued in front of a group of peer designers might make you blush at first, I thought the shift brought out the more relaxed side of everyone. I think most people had a positive experience with this session's discussions... I guess it just goes to show that sometimes challenges can surprise you.

Lessons from Chicago: How to do more with less and do it quickly

By Carrie Whitaker
Bowling Green State University

Wow, what a great session. Entertaining and insightful. To learn better packaging in one hour from the designers at the Chicago Sun-Times was certainly a treat.

It was very interesting to learn how they did an internal redesign because many papers, especially student papers, don't have the money to hire someone.

The first step was planning — always very important. This includes picking fonts and colors as well as maybe changing your nameplate. Then, the staff needs to identify the key aspects they use in their design. Some of those aspects were:

• The line (the main story)
• The offie (the second most important story)
• The refers
• The magic box (a pulled quote usually)

It is important to dress up the line and offie with chatter type, like magic boxes and sub heads, the speakers said. This helps make the key stories and photos on the page "pop-out" for the reader.

It has been helpful at the Sun-Times to be flexible with their aspects. For example, they are not afraid to use photos to refer to stories inside, use a quote for the headline or sub head, pull the river nearly halfway down the tabloid front and put a photo in it.

They said the power lies in discovering fresh ways to combine elements.

This session was organized well by its presenters and I found the content fascinating. It would have been better if the room had been larger, many people stood in the back or sat on the floor.

Diversity by Design

Posted By Ashley Nehls

This was a very good session, geared toward how to achive more diversity in your newsroom as well as how to reflect the diversity of a community in the paper.

Dori Maynard of the Maynard Institute was the head of this disscusion which included a panel of editors from papers such as the San Jose Mercury Times and the Detroit Free Press.

The conversation included such tips as how it is essential to create a newspaper that fundametally reflects their community, because the essential goal of every newspaper is to be accurate and no newspaper is accurate if it does not reflect the community.

Most papers show an unbalanced view of world as most common headshots on nation pages consist of the president and his cabinet. To fix this, if you have graphics you could inject people of all ages and races in to your graphics, and look for diversity when taking photos.

Another issue that was discussed during this session is how while hiring always consider diversity in the fields of race, gender, age, religious affiliation, socio-economic status and political standing.

I feel that this was a great session, that i wish more people would have attended, because it is a very important issue for every newspaper and I feel that more newspapers should concentrate on these issues.

New Typefaces: Where they come from, what they're for

By Carol-Lyn Jardine
Brigham Young University

Presenters:
Tobias Frere-Jones, Hoefler & Frere-Jones
Jonathan Hoefler, Hoefler & Frere-Jones

Topic: News Type. (And non-news type)

6 Qualities of News Type
1. Clear
2. Economical
3. Active: where text is dense, letters should invite reading
4. Proportionate : select with size in mind
5. Thorough
6. Expressive: should be broad, orderly and thoughtful

How do you choose typography?

By Carrie Whitaker
I have never seen three people so excited about fonts! This session was about analyzing your audience, specifially, history and culture, and then using that to create your font family.
One of the presenters said she often asks papers who are redesigning this question: If your paper were a person and it walked into a cocktail party, what would it be like. How would it dress, what would it say. Then, think about how you want it should act and dress.
There is no type formula, the presenters said. Each formula is different for whatever newspaper you are designing, because the audience is different.
Other helpful tips:
• The font should fit the personality and lives of your audience. Some fonts have a rugged look, used successfully by papers in mountainous areas. Some are more lively and energetic, which work well for a younger audience.
• One presenter said you know it's right when you fall in love with your font. Now, granted this woman seriously loves type faces, but it's true. When you are designing, do you love your font? If you don't should you?
• Be true to who you are — don't mimic others because it looks good in their paper.
• If you have a straight, strong and clean font, it can be forgiving when your design is not fabulous. Pick a font that is forgiving in that manner.
• Let the type reflect the flow of your content. Do you want only your features to pop out? Is this what you normally do? Or are you more dramatic in dressing up all front page stories? Decide and let your font do the chore for you.

I thought this session was very helpful. I had not thought about how the fonts themselves connect to readers, other than the fact that they need to be easy to read and help the audience navigate the page. But to use fonts that reflect their lifestyles — that is pretty cool.