Involve the designer early for great pages

By David Yarnold

In the fall of 2000, we introduced the new San Jose Mercury News, our first redesign in a decade. m mThe Mercury News has long been known for opportunistic design: taking the best story of the day and telling it with dramatic flair. Given the cacophony of media messages in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, we try to cut through the clutter. One of the other primary goals of our redesign was to increase the word count in our headlines, allowing for more nuanced presentation and more sophistication in display type.

Our front page centerpieces generally reflect a week-ahead plan which is, of course, subject to change. The story about handguns was several days in the works and we knew the day ahead that we would craft a centerpiece around that story.

Sometimes, though, serendipity reigns and we take advantage of what we have. That was the case on the page about the downturn in Silicon Valley. Managing Editor Susan Goldberg saw three stories — two coming off daily developments — falling under the same umbrella and she called an audible that day.

The specifics:

Which gun is real?

In a week that saw law enforcement officials kill two men waving fake guns, our challenge was to convey the front-page information in an innovative way. Why not run pictures of a real gun and a fake gun and simply challenge readers to do over a cup of coffee what police officers have a split second to do?

The display type said it all: “Which gun is real?” It was the question we all asked when we saw the two pictures.

We don’t do many photo cutouts on our front page, but because this was a magazine-style centerpiece and there was not a larger context in which the guns needed to be seen, we dropped the background to raise the impact.

Front page — “Silicon Valley Slowdown”

We had been reporting the story in daily increments: Company X announces layoffs; funding for new companies is harder to come by, homes are sitting on the market longer.

But we had not stepped back to provide deeper context to the story that was happening all around us. The Silicon Valley economy was slowing down.

On Jan. 30, our front-page centerpiece consisted of three stories and two graphics that illustrated what most of us already were feeling: Signs are everywhere that the local economy is taking a hit.

We focused on three areas: housing, philanthropy and venture capital.

We took advantage of display type on the cover to highlight a point from each of these areas.

This package was not built around dominant art. No single image was strong enough to carry the point. Three images were part of the package, but we relied on display type to quickly convey the slowdown concept.

Perspective — “Can we pick up the pieces?”

Perspective is a news analysis section, devoted to giving readers a deeper look at the week’s top stories — and sometimes providing new ways to think about “old” topics. Our goal in the redesign was to go hard off the news. This piece on the California’s energy crisis is a good example of that.

The thinking for the “Can we pick up the pieces?” cover took a logical progression. We thought about different symbols of power, including the light bulb. The concept of a system that is broken and needs to be fixed was dominant in the piece. A broken light bulb made sense, but seemed to be a cliché.

But what if the shards formed the shape of California? We broke two light bulbs and photographed the shards and base. Designer Jonathon Berlin arranged the shards in Photoshop into the shape of California.

Someone suggested that we needed a hand or some type of movement to pull the whole idea together. We found an image that was already in the right position and combined the elements.

A common lesson from all of these pages: designers were involved early in the process. We’re not big believers in a formal maestro kind of process; just good collaborative work based on consistent communication.

Yarnold is executive editor of San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News.

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