College Front Page will be shutting down indefinitely on Friday, November 2, 2012
Thanks for everyone who was involved over the last 8 years in furthering student journalism
With the last Star Wars movie opening today, it's appropriate to take a look at one of the Star Wars pages published. The Daily Egyptian ran this one back in April, but it caught my eye.
This is a pretty simple page overall, with a large headline and shots from the two trilogies. The text of the story is laid out in the same format as the familiar screen crawl is in the series and that's where I wanted to focus my attention.
There's some good information in this article that spans across all of the movies and can definitely serve for a hook for the few people who just haven't cared for the Star Wars universe to be drawn into the series. And while the slanted text is a great nod to the nostalgia factor, I worry about the readability of it - especially toward the top of the article. I've got the PDF of this blown up to 100 percent and I can barely read the top of the article. I'm worried that the readability would had come across a bit worse on newsprint.
A good rule of thumb if you're going to do reverse text is to blow up your font size some. It looks like the Egyptian staff did that here, but the size increase doesn't compensate for the slant. I don't think the layout would had suffered at all if the slant was taken out.
Kudos to the Daily Egyptian for trying something different. Just remember - don't sacrifice readability for the sake of a gimmick. It might look cool, but if it doesn't convey the information to your readers, the point will be missed.
