5 Step Hack to create weekly Newspaper Editorial Layouts and not lose your mind
My boss excitedly made an announcement early in 2019 that we would be taking a full page in a national newspaper called Business Day where we would publish insightful marketing articles as it relates to the Nigerian context. It was going to be a weekly process that would see the articles published in the papers every Monday.
This process was soon established as a routine within the company- A selected person who could be from any department writes and shares an article, which is then approved and sent to me to arrange into a layout that speaks to the subject matter and is visually appealing. It took a while, some moments of raised voices, missed deadlines and hair grabbing situations before we arrived at this process that works and at the very least gets the job done.
What’s a girl to do when she has a truckload of work and lands this interesting and challenging project? She comes up with a process as fast as possible that would:
- Ensure she delivers layouts that needed as few adjustments as possible so she doesn’t spend more time than necessary on the task every week.
- Make sure the article gets to the publisher in time for its appearance in the paper
- More importantly, ensure she doesn’t lose her mind
To fulfil the above steps, I adopted these 5 hacks every week to come up with engaging editorials while carrying out my other very numerous tasks.
Hack 1: Stare at the article for 15 minutes…or more
I usually get the articles sent to me in a 4–5 page, 12pt font size, single line spacing word document (we arrived at this number of pages based on my recommendation on what would best fit the editorial layout without making the font size too small to read when printed).
I found reading and understanding the articles first made creating and developing concepts for the layouts much easier. I am of the school of thought that I can’t properly communicate anything visually if I don’t have a full understanding of what should be interpreted visually.
Hack 2: Open Pinterest/ Behance and look at all the stunning editorials and wonder how people even come up with some of the stuff you’re seeing
No seriously, there are some editorials I look at and I’m like ‘How in the world did this originate from a human mind?’.
With the article fresh in my mind, I open Pinterest and Behance and apart from being wowed by all the wonderful layouts on there, I try to think up concepts that I can develop into something visual.
I sketch layout ideas or write down concepts as they come to me as quickly as possible while feeding on the yummy editorial goodness on these platforms.
In extreme situations where the holy grail of Pinterest and Behance seem not to tickle my imagination into concepts, you will find me going to other teammates to pick their brain a bit on what could work for the article.
Hack 3: Share with your team to get feedback on layout/ concept
With my sketch/ concept in hand, I reach out to the author of the article and my teammates to get their opinion and find out if there is anything that could make the layout better.
Hack 4: Design and Refine
Now it’s about this time I fire up my all-time preferred tool of choice — Adobe Illustrator and get to work bringing my concept/ sketch to life. This time, I go into what I call ‘Beast Mode’ where I plug my ears with my kind of music and it’s just me and my laptop screen. No distractions.
Sometimes the end product is not as I envision it to be so I refine it until it looks much better than the previous version.
Hack 5: Proofread
This hack I learned from my boss. With editorials, there is nothing like too much proofreading. Since I more or less copy and paste the text from the word document to the textbox in Illustrator, some typos might appear without my knowledge. To ensure nothing like that happens, I read the article again and spell check, get the author to read it again and send it for final approval before it is then forwarded to the publisher.
When the article appears on the papers the next Monday, I pat myself on the back and I hit reset for the next article.
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Thank you for reading!
Special shout out to my teammates whom these hacks would not be effective without their valuable input. ❤
Generating concepts for each article takes the most time for me and I would welcome any tips and platforms in the comment section that can make my editorial designs much easier and fluid.
Finally, you can read all these wonderful articles and more on: https://www.redwire-group.com/thinking/
