Newspaper Centerpieces

For three years, I was a designer for the Asbury Park Design Studio (Gannett). I worked on newspapers spanning the Northeast region. It was my responsibility to take news story and create a visual representation for them that was eye-catching and interesting to consumers, but also accurately represents the nature of the story.

As a special project for the Christmas edition of the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, I created a poster cover page for the Athletes of the Year spread. I worked closely with the producers and editors of the paper to truly showcase the great accomplishment of these athletes, while also designing something fresh and interesting, but more importantly, fun. As a team, we decided that we really wanted to highlight each individual athlete, but I didn’t want the cover to seem crowded. The editors were also adamant that they wanted the athletes names included on the cover. So with all those things taken into consideration, I came up with this color burst design which was something I felt you would see in ESPN television graphics. There were a few iterations where I tried to make the pictures and color burst flow into each other, but nothing was working. The banners underneath each picture was a clever solution to keep the pictures looking like they were floating.

For this cover page of The Ithaca Journal, I created an illustration of a concert ticket for this Grateful Dead story, playing with vertical and horizontal layouts. I also focused on using whitespace strategically so the centerpiece doesn’t seem heavy since the ticket imagery is a deeper, dusty purple color. In the ticket graphic itself, I wanted to give readers a sort of easter egg, so I used the date of the Grateful Dead’s iconic concert at Cornell University, also mentioned in the first line of the story, as the date listed on the concert ticket. Because I was focusing on this date, I wanted the ticket to look old school and a little bit grungy.

This was probably one of the most fun cover designs I ever did. For this cover page for the Star-Gazette, I created an illustration of a UFO, utilizing the light beam element of the design to seamlessly incorporate the headline and story into the overall design. Normally I like to leave some whitespace in centerpieces because it lets the piece breathe a bit, but because this story was a little quirky I thought I would punch in the color of the entire centerpiece space so it’s really attention grabbing.