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
Part of the problem with designing the front page of your paper is that it's normally the showcase for the best of what you have to offer for that edition. You want to play up each story as much as possible, and sometimes you get so involved in making each package big that they all suddenly become...well...big.
The June 27 issue of The Daily Iowan comes across this way. I look at the page and I'm not quite sure which story is the most important one. The feature centerpiece is on an ice-cream shop, which fits due to the hot weather across much of the nation. The lead news story is about hybrids.
But what throws this page off are the bottom two stories. The "Wide-open UI spaces" page has a headline that's just as big as the lead story, and bigger than the centerpiece. What's happening then is when you look at the page, your eye starts at the hybrid story, then skips over the ice cream story and goes straight down to the UI spaces story. The story on the death of a peace activist has such a catch subhead that you immediately move to that story - then to the inside pages.
Just a little bit of headline size tweaking would restore the order on this page. There is a good sense of hierarchy here beyond that one headline. By taking the UI spaces headline down some, your eye will naturally go from Hybrids, to ice cream to UI spaces.
Things keeping track of where your eye goes on a page may not seem that important, but studies by the Poynter Institute say otherwise. It will help your reader get the most out of the paper and summer editions are great for experimenting with things like this.
