National problem, local solutions

National problem, local solutions

For this particular issue's centerpiece, the Missourian covered local attempts to combat childhood obesity while state legislation on the issue stalled. The photo I received posed an interesting design problem: It depicted the very program described in the article's lede, and it even included a U.S. representative — but the lede described this program as it applied to one elementary school in Columbia, and the photo showed the program for a different school.

Because of this, I decided to run the photo inside and use type to make this piece stand out. I began with a simple art headline and made the lede more inviting through the use of a drop cap and a bulleted list to set apart the series of events it describes as a group of children walks to school. The pull quote at the bottom of the piece provides a useful secondary entry point to the piece.

The other two articles on the page both came in later in the evening. One was a breaking news piece on a person who drowned in a nearby lake, and the other was on an Army specialist's funeral that had taken place the day before — which happened to have been Memorial Day. The lengths of those articles worked out so I didn't have to jump any part of them, which provided me with that much more flexibility on the jump page to run more of the centerpiece.