Rewards
Orlando Sentinel
Our Working section is a preprinted, single-page section that fronts the employment classifieds. It’s always an interesting exercise in conceptual thinking, because we don’t have an illustrator or a budget to buy art for the section.
Every week it’s a challenge. But this week took the cake — carrot cake, that is.
The original design was nothing to write home about, a fairly dull page with an illustration of a carrot dangling from a stick that I hunted down in the McClatchy-Tribune archive. But as soon as I sought feedback, our AME for visuals, Bonita Burton, saw the page and suggested that I try to find a way to give the page a more human element, and maybe to find a way to make the dangling carrot a motif. What I came up with required reporting the tips themselves, from the book that the story is about (The Carrot Principle, by Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick), writing them and running them by the business wire editor.
I think the final result, after many hours spent tinkering in CCI or at the public library reading source material, is a reasonably compelling page.