As is customary, front pages for the day after New Year's were dominated by football and new babies, but none of these pages were standouts. As is often the case, today's Best Front Design was based on a news story. Today's top news story is the shooting of Denver Broncos Darrent Williams. The Rocky Mountain News had the best presentation of this story.
Tabloid newspapers have an advantage when it comes to Best Front Design. The Rocky used its format to big advantage yesterday with its coverage of the
3,000 deaths in Iraq. Today's front big story could have worked just as well on a broadsheet, but
The Denver Post's front wasn't quite as strong.
Here's what made the Rocky's front better: A story-telling picture which showed the bullet-ridden limo, an emotion-packed main headline, a scene-setting label (Inside Darrent Williams' limo) and keys to related stories inside.
The main photo was almost monochromatic. The Rocky wisely limited the use of spot color elsewhere on the page to a single, powerful color – red – to avoid competition with the lead photo.
Room for improvement: Two tiny promos at the very bottom of the page competed with keys to Williams' stories inside, in part because they shared similar typography and the same color scheme. When we make things
look alike, we imply that they
are alike. But in this case, they were not.
Today seems like a one-story day in Denver. So those promos were likely to be ignored. Maybe they could have been dispensed with entirely.
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