Thursday, February 02, 2006

 

Cover contortions

I’ve been ranting and raving about this ever since I first saw today’s RedEye cover. It doesn’t make any sense until you read the story — and that’s bad news.

Here’s today’s image, which is courtesy of the RedEye’s Web site:

February 2, 2006

Now, what’s intriguing about this is that it would have made sense on the inside. After all, the story is about how sales of this home kit go up around Valentine’s Day.

But it doesn’t work as a cover. A good cover doesn’t require that you understand the story before you read it; a good cover does just the opposite, by giving you a way into it and making you pick it up and ask, “What’s that about?” The compositional choices just don’t jibe here. For one thing, the larger candy is the “Be Mine” candy, which is conventional, and it took me more than a second to figure out that the “You’re Busted” candy was even there. But more egregious is that the hedline doesn’t jibe with the art; until you notice the “You’re Busted” candy, which is so subliminally effective, it just doesn’t all click.

And by the time that click happens, unless you were going to pick up a RedEye anyway (cf. moi) or you want something else (crossword, Sudoku, etc.), it’s too late. You’ve already picked up a Trib or something.

The whole point of single-copy sales is that they have to move. Yes, the RedEye is free, which takes some of the pressure off — but that doesn’t excuse slacking on the cover strategy. If the rack is still more than half-full at 5 p.m., your cover is not doing its job. And when the newspaper is free…

I think the RedEye art staff overthought this cover, to be honest. Sometimes, if you sit around long enough, you come up with ideas that honestly don’t work, and you might not figure out that it’s too complex (or just plain unworkable) until you see it in print the next day. I’ve done it plenty of times, working with art stuff, and realized at some point that what I was suggesting was both implausible and stupid. (Kudos, Wes. Admit your failures.) And I think this is what happened to them.

It’s ironic, because recently Mark Friesen at NewsDesigner recently had a bit on the RedEye’s design revamp — and I agree with Mark that it’s been much-improved since its inception so long ago. The cover strategies are not as disastrous, they haven’t run a cutout on a black field — instant design kiss of death — in a long time, and they’re starting to get into the swing of running a European-style tab. (Full disclosure: I think the Red Streak worked better visually, and the Sun-Times could really stand to take a tip from its visual strategy. But the RedEye is published by a parent not struggling to stay alive.)

But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to overthink your art.

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?