-| Week No. 10 — It's almost the home stretch! |-

-| Critique |-

I did nothing design wise over the break except think about my upcoming two-page feature a few times. I've decided that I'm not going to use photos because we just did a huge food issue. Instead I'm going to use some sort of mushroom illo and a fancy hed as the main art for the page. Jazz it up with some carefully placed white space and hopefully I'll have a nice feature. I was kind of upset that the story took only the food angle of mushrooms. The lead started something along the lines of. . . Mushrooms are sprouting up this time of year. . . here's how locals cook with them. BUT, you don't cook with mushrooms that pop up in your yard. They didn't address poisinous mushrooms at all. I would have said something, but I didn't really feel like it was my place to.

-| React |-

(I know this isn't the "react to the food items you might have prepared" section, but hot damn, I just made some of the spiciest salsa of my entire life! If anyone likes super-spicy items, let me know. I CANNOT eat this entire batch on my own.)

I'm worried about my project. I really want to talk to the folks at Hispanic, and I have great contact info, but I haven't actually seen their magazine. How can I actually call someone and inquire about what they do without having seen their product? I think it'll take some very creative tact to work around that. I don't know if I should just move on to another mag.

The four presentations we saw in class today were very good. I was so confused with the Glamour hair products thing. It seemed like too far of a stretch in mine eye. At least it's cool to know, though, that it is in fact possible to be in a great position in just a couple of years.

In the scrapbooking magazine, I found it hard to tell the difference between ads and editorial. Just an interesting observation. It was all so cute and pastel filled.

-| You Can't Miss. . . |-

The new EyeTrack study has been released. It came up with some interesting findings. Mostly the same stuff that we already knew. People tend to see colorful and newsy photos first (meaning they don't notice posed or black and white photos as fast). Also, people pay more attention to ASFs (Alternative Story Forms!) and their comprehension rates are higher with ASFs! This totally can apply to magazines. Just pulling out some info into a dandy little graphic can up interest and comprehension by a lot!

Also, Mark Friesen is going to be one of the SSND judges. He's the guy who runs my blog, newsdesigner.com. I'll fill you in on more as we'll probably have opportunities to meet with Mark when he's on campus.

From an e-mail from Joy Mayer about the contest: "Mark Friesen is the author of the newsdesigner.com blog and designs at the Oregonian, though he has a new Web-based job that I don't know the details of."