When design outshines a story ... hate that.

Because sometimes a designer's work can be misleading and/or overstate the story. And it's not always because the reporter did a bad job.

Case in point:

Local team was undergoing a coaching search. One candidate was clearly leader in the clubhouse, and it was basically his job to lose.

We did a fancy front-page spread on the coaching search, listing 5 candidates with their various backgrounds, pros, cons, etc.

Problem is, the package treated each candidate the same. Whereas in reality the leader in the clubhouse had a 95% chance of getting the job --- he did wind up getting it --- and the other four were the 2nd-, 3rd-, 4th- and 5th-place horses at Belmont behind Secretariat.

Pretty design confused the reader by making him believe it was a five-horse race.

 

That's not pretty design, that's the graphic not clearly laying out the fact that the one candidate was the 95% favorite and the others were clear longshots.

That's like if I said your nutgraph sucked but I was such an idiot that I thought it was the lede.

But good job not knowing what you are talking about.

 

I suspect there's a good number of people here who like Best American Sports Writing volumes because they run the stories with no art.

Why does it matter, really, if "design outshines a story?" Both try to draw readers deeper into the paper and non-readers into dropping the quarters into the slot. And at first blush, readers are going to be attracted to a good design or good photos. If anything, I would be disappointed if a story I wrote that I thought was pretty good was given a block of gray and a file pic.

People for the most part are more likely to read a 15-inch story with elements than a 25-inch story. And a good reporter can still tell a story within whatever constraints given them.

 

I designed this section, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

 

As a designer, I'd like to think that making the design better than the writing only helps the writer. I hope my design gets someone to read a story, and I don't care as much if they're disappointed unless I wrote the story. In a perfect world, everyone does their part, but I'm not going to dumb down my design to the level of a crappy story.