- Assemble your stories and photos. You should have final edits for all your stories and a good selection of photos and / or other art.
- Which stories are most important and which are human interest and somewhat less important?
- Choose the dominant photo for the page. It should be something strong and eye-catching. Anchor it near the top. Every page should have a dominant photo. If your most important story has no photo, do you have any “wild” or standalone feature photos that can be used? Faces in photos should be at least the size of a US quarter.
- Chose secondary art for other stories. Move these toward the edges so they dont butt up against the dominant photo, or other headlines. But don’t put art at the bottom of story.
Once the elements are ready, you’ll want to sketch out a design to follow. You can do this using dummies or just the images themselves in InDesign.
- Plan a modular design: The page should be dynamically balanced, with large photos at the top and a variety of story placements. All stories should be shaped like rectangles, without “doglegs” or irregular shapes. Readers should see multiple points of entry and a mix of news and features, with about one-third art and photos?
- Design sequence: (Vertical layout) Photo, cutline, headline, text.
- Dollar bill rule: Did you remember the “dollar bill” rule? (No more than one dollar bill’s length between art / photos / headlines. The idea is to keep from filling a page only with text.)
- Directionality: Does all the art face the the appropriate story?
- Unity: Are all the story elements close to each other?
- Avoid trapped white space: White spaces are important in the design. They should separate stories and larger bits should bleed off to the sides.
Now fill in the headlines and story text.
- Write the headlines, with the largest at the top and smallest towards the bottom. Headlines should cover all columns of text. (Avoid raw wraps). Use three deck headlines for one column, two decks for two columns, and only one deck headline for three or more columns. Avoid writing stilted, jargon-filled, verb-free headlines. Look out for bad splits and awful juxtapositions. Are any of the headlines butting together? In that case, do you need to box one of the stories?
- Insert story text: Text width should be no wider than 20 picas (3.3 inches). and not narrower than 10 picas (1.6 inches). Gutters should be uniform and no more than one pica.
- Balanced Design — Step back and look at the page. Is it more or less balanced? Does anything seem out of place.?
- Double check headline, cutline, byline spellings. Some of the worst mistakes happen because they are so obvious no one thinks to look for them.