Best in class
In a city with three institutions of higher education, human-interest pieces about professors tend to attract an audience. This particular time, the University of Missouri nominated three faculty members for the U.S. Professor of the Year award.
This centerpiece provided an interesting opportunity from a design standpoint: I knew I had to create a dominant image without making any one of the nominees seem more important than the others, but I wanted to make the package more visually compelling than the simple gridlike arrangements designers often use in these situations.
After trying a few arrangements, I decided to do three main things to the images I received:
- Crop them somewhat unconventionally.
- Stagger their arrangement to lend balance to the package and give the reader's eye a less rigid path down the page.
- Overlap them just enough to be obviously intentional.
The article itself was rather long, so I ran most of it inside with lists of the nominees' previous teaching awards. This also allowed me to run more of each of the other front-page articles. Since the Columbia City Council meets on Monday nights, the Missourian's Tuesday issues tend to have a higher amount than usual of news related to local government, and this particular issue was no exception — especially in the continuing aftermath of a SWAT team raid that drew national attention.
