I love looking at the Newseum‘s daily dose of front pages from around the country and even the world. The thumbnails give you a great glance at how narrow the press web has become. It is fun to go from state to state and compare papers. It is like taking a trip without leaving your computer and cup of coffee.
I ran across this front yesterday from the Mobile (AL) Press-Register.
This front is a great example of what can happen if you give a designer too many typefaces to play with and too much color. Restraint would have helped by giving the remaining special effects more power.
Hiding so much of the nameplate is just inexcusable, even if it is the south and it IS NASCAR, after all. Hamlin is not even from Alabama. All that colored type! I’m trying to read the paper and it’s as if someone is shining a flashlight in my eyes.
There is nothing particularly wrong with any of what was done, it’s just that ALL of it is too much.
The takeaway? Sometimes in newspaper design less is more.
By the way, as a sign of the times, the line “Mobile edition” in the flag initially struck me as an ad for the paper’s cell phone version….
Related posts:
I completely agree; the design is so busy that it’s actually a bit blinding. There are so many font sizes and styles and colors… My eyes don’t quite know where to go first on the page. Good design should do more than make the items on the page look interesting and exciting; it should also direct the reader. This front page definitely doesn’t do that.
I checked Newseum today, and the cover is quite similar: too many colors and fonts. I looked through a few other pages of covers, and I didn’t see any that looked as blatantly busy as that of the Press-Register. Makes me wonder what the designer was hoping to accomplish.
I feel that part of the problem is also how much content is shoved on the front page of the paper. If the font for the sports stories were minimized, or put under a general “weekend sports roundup 1C” headline it wouldn’t be as bad.
Also, all of the colors at the top really distract from the rest of the news. It will grab attention, but not for the right reasons.
The other thing is that a third of the front page, your most valuable real estate, is given over to (obnoxious) teasers. How about some news?