Tuesday, July 13, 2010

2010 primary election guide

I hadn't even worked for the paper for two months and I was given a project. I became the designer of the 2010 guide to the primary. It's in a tab format, about the size of VOX, which I had worked for previously. I came up with a concept (with the help of other newsroom people), executed the cover and flowed in all of the copy for the 24-page issue. Awesome, right? I thought so.

So, let's talk about the cover. The primary, as you know, is an election of sorts that determines which candidates run in the actual election in November. This year, it's a pretty big deal because the governor's seat (and other U.S. Senate and House seats) are up for grabs. I wanted to emphasize the numbers in the election. The final number of candidates came out to 118. (One more than this cover says, but it was printed correctly, I promise. The contests number actually changed to 57, too.) The initial idea for the numbers was to isolate them in the midst of negative space to draw emphasis. However, I thought that was a bit boring and didn't have the emphasis I was looking for, so I started using red and blue. I made the numbers huge (more than 200pts) and aligned everything to each other. This is what I came up with. I added a little drop shadow to the letters and numbers so that they really pop. I think it's a unique way to just list numbers and elements of the primary. The typeface, one of the newspaper's headline fonts, is called Relay. It looks really contemporary and makes the design kind of resemble Barack Obama's "Hope" political ads.

As for the inside, I modeled it after the newspaper's previous guides. There were 118 mini-bios of all the candidates that chose to participate. The bios included the candidates's name, party, age, residence, family, occupation, education, political experience and top issues/objectives. The candidates were divided into their respective counties. It was 24 pages worth of biographical agate. Not fun, but I barreled through.

Overall, I think the guide turned out really well. What do you think?

1 comment:

  1. Looks great, and I am glad you did it. Life always provides opportunities and hopefully in two years, you will find some other youngster to fill your shoes. Love the color on the cover, great eye appeal.

    D

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