The Components of Good News Design

News designers must master the art of combining journalistic instinct with aesthetic aptitude, says Monica Moses, a Poynter visual journalism faculty member.

Moses offers some key points to producing top quality visual presentations that both inform and appeal to the eye.

AESTHETIC QUALITIES

Graphic design is a craft requiring many skills. To produce a page that is pleasing to the eye, a designer should work toward the following:

1. Good proportions. Is there a focal point on the page, a dominant visual image?

2. Sound typography. Is the type styled well? Are letter spacing, word spacing, leading, alignment and such under control? Is the typeface appropriate to the topic?

3. Judicious use of color. Is color used to draw the eye to key parts of the page? If different palettes are represented by the visuals on the page, has there been an effort made to unify them?

4. Understand organizing elements. Do rules, boxes and other organizers lend structure to the page without calling attention to themselves?

JOURNALISTIC QUALITIES

You can design good pages without knowing a lot about the aesthetics of design. But you can't design good pages without thinking like a journalist and tailoring a page to the reader. These elements are key to visual communication:

1. Visuals that bolster the story. Do your pictures tell pieces of the story, show its drama or document its occurrence?

2. Display type that reinforces the visuals. Readers look first at dominant visuals, then to adjacent headlines to make sense of the art. Do your art and headline support each other? Is the thrust of the story clear at a glance?

3. Nothing extraneous, nothing left out. The presentation of a story should be as thoughtful as the story itself; it shouldn't have holes or redundancies. Particularly when putting photos together in a package, think about the lead photo as the lead of the story. Choose and arrange art so that a reader can quickly grasp the nut of the story.

4. Innovation. Don't introduce gimmickry to a page for the sake of novelty. But look for ways to make a layout interesting that also help convey the meaning of the story.