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Designing Breaking News
August 28, 2008 - 10:13pmAssistant Design Editor Munier Salem ’10 writes about what it was like to design at The Sun the night Schedulizer went down.:
Breaking news on State Street! It’s just after 8:00 p.m. down here at The Sun and we’re rearranging the front page to make way for the PeopleSoft debacle.
In a nutshell, the new software Cornell uses to enroll students is slow, buggy and frustrating to work with. Schedulizer.com, a website that aggregates Cornell course roster information and uses it to create optimized schedules for students, has had enough with the new PeopleSoft, and it has shut down the website indefinitely for its Cornell clients.
Turn and face the Sun, cha-cha-changes!
August 24, 2008 - 8:27pmWell folks, we here in the design department are working furiously to bring you fresh new layouts for the fall semester (I always thought fall fashion trumped spring's anyway!). Carol is in the home stretch, working on a brand new Ecplise layout on thick, white magazine-style paper. We're also pumping out a tweaked sports section, featuring a new "Inside Sports" bar, a new "Inside This Issue" bar for the front page and fresh infographic styles and ideas. The entire department has been revving up with assistants and night editors to get ready for the first intense months of school, where we'll be training new staff and balancing new coursework.
Weathering the storm: Design's take on print journalism's decline
Will print Media falls under the might of the Blogosphere? Not a chance!
August 9, 2008 - 3:55pmNews Editor Ben Eisen’s '10 recent post on the survival of print journalism in The Sun's From the Editors blog represents a huge concern flowing through the newspaper industry right now: can print survive alongside web based news.
Insert Eclipse Pun Here
August 5, 2008 - 11:09pmA few days ago, I received the email of doom from our resident newsroom god, John C. Schroeder ’74.
“Who is going to make the dummy pages [for the Eclipse supplement]?”
A little piece of me died as I said ‘goodbye’ to my summer and ‘hello’ to redesigning The Sun’s magazine-style weekend supplement, Eclipse. It wasn’t until I sat down at my laptop and opened up Quark 7, our publishing software, that I began to feel a bit of excitement at the task before me. The Eclipse redesign, while daunting, basically gave me carte blanche to indulge my wildest creative fantasies about white space and sans-serif fonts. What more could a graphic designer want?
A Conspiracy Theorist in Design
Is Cornell planning to move the suspension bridge? A doctored image may provide clues to the answer...
July 27, 2008 - 5:45pmI’ve always been a bit of a conspiracy theorist. Okay, so perhaps not in the “Who shot JFK?/Where were the air craft carriers for Pearl Harbor?” sort of way… more like in the “CNN is the mouth piece of corporate America” sort of way… So when I stumbled upon an interesting little anomaly in Cornell’s Comprehensive Master Plan, involving a bit of photo-shopping, my first thought was “hold the presses”. My second thought was “well, no one’s updated CMYK in a while…”
Color Me Impossible
June 28, 2008 - 1:48amI was aimlessly web surfing my way through the boredom of a summer internship when I came across the article, “Pixel Perfect”, published in The New Yorker last month. It outlined the lifestyle and works of Pascal Dangin, a professional photograph retoucher. As a Photoshop-guru-in-training myself, I decided Dangin basically has my dream job. He works with top fashion designers, world-famous photographers and a-list celebs, taking seemingly flawless people and images and making them even more perfect, all with the click of a mouse or the wave of the magic wand tool.
The Type-Off Goes National
June 6, 2008 - 6:54pmGraphic design has always eeked its way into presidential campaigns. Many remember the famous analysis of the Bush/Cheney and Kerry/Edwards logos which analyzed everything from the choice of fonts (obnoxiously bolded sans serif vs. light highbrow serif) to the placement of the flags (firmly anchored vs. flying off the page). All this seemed to confirm Bush’s brawny, strength-obsessed politics, versus the perception of Kerry as an elite weakling.
Great Power, Great Responsibility
June 2, 2008 - 6:46pmSummertime, and the livin’ is easy! Your dedicated Sun editors are currently scattered across the US (and beyond) enjoying a much needed reprieve from Cornell prelims and endless “Sunny” nights putting together Ithaca’s favorite morning Daily.
Despite these large distances, e-mails have been whizzing over the heartland as we take this break from publication to examine the basic elements of the sun and how to improve them. One fun little project I’ve been working on for the past couple days is a logo for a new blog covering developments in the departure of Provost Biddy Martin.
A Study Break, for Gazing Forward
May 10, 2008 - 11:38pmAlright people. It’s time for me to confess a dirty little secret. I am a Capricorn… no, not a casual Capricorn— a hard core, anal retentive, pica wielding, algebra-double-checking, relationship-controlling Capricorn. During this stressful time in the life of Cornellians we call “finals week”, I please my anal desires (tehehehe) by making a detailed study schedule.
When a page designer makes a schedule, it of course has to reflect all his design fetishes. For me, it’s neat, clean cut boxes, with gentle shades of green, punctuated by rich bloody red. My font of choice? California FB— light and springy, like the weather that beckons from beyond the library walls.
CMYK Presents "The TypeOff"
April 30, 2008 - 8:01pmIt takes alkynes to make a world. While we in the Sun Design Department are definitely not nerdy enough to crack such a crude chemistry joke, we do have our own “geek sessions”. One such event took place this past Saturday when Design Editor Carol Zou, Assistant Design Editors Deb Tan and I, sat down for an informal conversation about some Daily Sun fonts, moderated by Arts & Entertainment Editor Julie Block.