This week, we're taking a look at La Mecha, the student newspaper at New Mexico Highlands University - a paper that underwent a mid-year redesign.
The story behind La Mecha's current look is pretty neat. Khushroo Ghadiali, the editor of the paper, started visiting the Visual Editors chatroom several months ago. He is better known to chatters as "Happy," which matches his upbeat personality. He sought feedback and guidance from the chatroom crowd as he redesigned the school's paper. The paper you see here is the final result.
With the paper being a bi-weekly, the staff here doesn't have the luxury of devoting the cover to just a single issue like you see in a lot of tabs. By focusing in on one subject, in this case the iron story, the tab would have a very strong visual prescence. But even though this is a very active tab front with four stories, it doesn't feel crowded. Lots of white space has been incorporated here to set the stories apart from each other.
There is a sense of hierarchy here, but it's not that strong. The two rail stories have headline sizes that appear to be about the same font size. The only difference is that the right rail has four decks and the left has three. You have no clear sense of which is the lead story. The centerpiece is well-defined and uses white space to set it apart from the regular news stories.
The page's real weakness here is the centerpiece. The photo appears to be too small for the space it's alloted. It screams to be run at a bigger size, simply because there's a lot of detail there that will be lost by the time the photo makes the transfer to newsprint. It's a rough decision to make because if you do run the photo any bigger, you will certainly have to knock away two of the stories. And there may not be any other room for those stories in the paper. A suggestion here would have the photo on the front act as a standalone teaser. You could blow it up to where it fills the entire two columns and use the cutline to tease inside the paper. With the bottom story, you could place that in the rail under the student recognition piece. The result will be an extremely strong visual with the photo that will attract people's eye when they see it and also provide some additional teaser to the inside, as well as the teasers done on top.
Utilizing the size a photo should run is something that comes with practice. It's something I just learned in the past four months. You'll eventually be able to tell when a photo is too big, too small or just about right. When in doubt, seek another opinion.
La Mecha has really done quite a lot in the past few months and it's hard to believe this is the same paper I first looked at in December. Happy and his staff have done a wonderful job in their redesign and it really goes to show what sort of resources are out there to help papers of any size with their visual changes.
