Reaching for the rays
Orlando Sentinel
Each Sunday since October, we have used our open A3 Nation&World page for a single, in-depth news analysis story. The topic ranges, but the task of designing them often falls to me, as one of the Saturday designers.
Space and science are topics near and dear to my heart, so when I was given this assignment about the launch of a solar probe, I found myself nearly doing somersaults in excitement. But there wasn’t much to work with, visually: a staff photo by our space photographer, Red Huber, and a fairly uninteresting and possibly incorrect graphic from MCT.
I took the assignment to heart and built this page from the ground up, as much as a reporter as a designer. I called NASA and had them send me promotional art and information for a sidebar, and worked with Lisa Frazier, one of our graphics artists, to make the graphic correct. From the fact packet that NASA sent me, I was able to determine the relative size of the probe, and I used that for the scale graphic at the right. Then, I passed all of the information along to the wire desk, along with the text that I had compiled.
In hindsight I wish I had fought harder for the original composition of the page. The wire desk pressed to have something “fun” in the story text, and I indulged them by moving the probe from the sidebar to the mainbar; unfortunately, it feels out of place, unmoored.
All the same, it was one of the most fun assignments I’ve had the pleasure to work on at the Sentinel.