Excuse my butchering of the Spanish language.
So I designed department pages for the first time this week and it was...well it was harder than I thought. I planned to come in on Saturday because I figured I'd just knock it out and be able to have a lazy Sunday. But then my car decided to break down. Figures.
So I went in at 1 on Sunday because I didn't get up until noon (weekends are for sleeping right? don't judge me). But I was like hey, it's a page pretty much set in stone with how it's supposed to/can look. I can do that in a couple of hours noooooo problem. Yeah. I was wrong.
It wasn't terrible, but it was a lot harder to work with copy that I couldn't manipulate. It had to follow the style guide, which is fine and dandy, but proves to help little in adjusting for space. I also had like 4 different elements that were supposed to go on one page: an anchor (500 words), a sidebar to the anchor, a playlist and a recurring section box (which was supposed to be 200 words but the writer decided there needed to be much more said about this garage band and wrote 400 words). Oh, and a lead photo to go with the anchor.
I tried as hard as I could to make it all fit but it just wasn't going to work. I moved that damn blue box for the "In the Garage" section every which way I could. Let's just say CTRL-Z was my favorite key combination that day.
Alas, it all wasn't going to fit without looking completely stupid. So I decided to throw the playlist to online only and keep the other three elements. However, every single one had overset copy. The art director, Rachel, said I was allowed to just put the extra copy on another page and the editors would edit it down to fit, but I felt like such a jerk. My job is to make it fit on the page, not tear apart a writer's story. I was a writer for Vox a year ago and now I know why my stories would come out all wonky sometimes. It's really interesting to get to be on both sides of the production.
The only fun thing I really got to do was make a cut-out of the photo. I cut out the rapper guy's foot because he had it up, resting on a table in the photo. So I placed it over the headline so he's just chillin' there like the cool guy he is. Rachel said she liked it, but we'll see if it made it to print. I'm guessing that the editors either cut the copy (hahahah see what I did there? cut copy...kutcopy...heyyy-oh) or the art directors made things fit because I haven't been called in to change anything. Which both relieves me and makes me nervous. I should take some tips from the chill rapper dude.
No comments:
Post a Comment