Further thoughts from SND Boston 07
Here are some further thoughts from the SND Boston conference this year which I talked about in the first posting briefly.
EXTREME SPORTS
Sections as loud, fast, and in-your-face as the games they cover. Featuring Vince Chiaramonte (The Buffalo News), Scott Minister (The Columbus Dispatch), and Alexandro Medrano (El Nuevo Excelsior). Traducido a español. Stanbro
Of course not all great design can be done over night, and one of the obvious points raised was that if there is enough lead in time to a story being published, coupled with resources being made available to the designer/journalist, and most importantly a passion for sport, then beautifully designed pages as shown below can be achieved.
The theme of passion for sport was raised over and over. It makes sense too. If you really love the work you are doing, you are more likely to put the effort and time into doing good work and doing justice to the story. It was obvious from the presentations that not only were they proud of the work they were producing these people were really passionate about the sports they were designing for. What a great combination.
The passion coupled with time and resources provides a major distinction between New Zealand newspapers sports sections and those on display at SND and on newspaper design blogs. In NZ there is a heavy reliance on stock photography or agency photography with little or no use of designers and illustrators. One of the auctions at the SND conference was for an illustration by one designer for your newspaper. Although I am not with a newspaper, I was going to donate it to either the ODT or the Press from New Zealand, just to show them what can be done. Some of the layouts shown below just wouldn’t even be considered in NZ. Which is a real pity as they add so much to the pleasure that one gets from Newspapers and only adds to the passion and drama that is sports. It’s not as if we don’t have the subject matter, we do, we just choose to resource and present the sports sections like all the other sections of the newspaper in NZ.
One interesting point was hammered home over and over, Infographics on their own do not tell a story. Good infographics can help, but there needs to be a context and more often than not they are used to support a story, rather than try to tell a story on their own.
I would love to see the day where an illustrator and graphic designer were assigned to each of the sections within a newspaper in NZ. Give these people the resources to be able to do not only the day to day stuff that adds to the news, but allow them the time and money to be able to produce the work of the sort of standard we see below. There is no doubt that this sort of work can be produced in NZ, it can, we just choose not to. In this time of falling readership and encroachment of other media sources it seems a shame to just take it and not take the initiative and create a richer newspaper environment in NZ.
