CMYK

Designing History

Munier Salem — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

America has voted and Barack Obama is the new president of the United States of America. Students storm the libraries, cheers erupt in Collegetown Bars, and the staff of the Cornell Daily Sun frolick, drunk, through the Commons into a party held by the Ithaca Workers Council.

The staff heads back to 139 W. State street and up to the board room to hear the election speech. With Obama's word of hope and message of change, we file downstairs to finish up the paper. Time to design the front page.

Designing Breaking News

Munier Salem — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:13:17 -0400

Assistant 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!

Munier Salem — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:27:59 -0400

Well 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

Munier Salem — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:55:34 -0400

News 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

Carol Zou — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:09:32 -0400

A 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

Munier Salem — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 17:45:42 -0400

I’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

Deborah Tan — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:48:39 -0400

I 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

Munier Salem — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:54:27 -0400

Graphic 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

Munier Salem — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:46:31 -0400

Summertime, 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

Munier Salem — Sat, 10 May 2008 23:38:14 -0400

Alright 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"

Munier Salem — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:01:57 -0400

It 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.

Type-Off: The Prelude

Carol Zou — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:43:49 -0400

Wanted: A Venetian masculine type with a strong chin and distinct ligatures for an open-type relationship. Must be an ambitious ascender who can raise my baselines. No light weights or aliasing, please.

While the above may seem like a corny set-up for a “That’s what she said” joke, serious requests for certain typefaces run rampant on graphic designer forums. (Yes, those exist.) Every day, a graphic designer sits down at his or her computer, makes a text box and proceeds to contemplate the holy grail of designer life: the font type.

Sun Silliness

Munier Salem — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 21:59:55 -0400

Some say that graphic design is basically “selling out to the man”. To these critics, I say… you’re probably right. But in the meanwhile, I’m enjoying page design.

One thing I don’t enjoy are carry pages. You know when you finish a front page article and it says “See DEBATE page 8”? Yup, page 8 is a “carry” page, since the article carries over onto it. We tend to do these pages late at night, under-caffeinated and over deadline. These pages tend to have a lot of ads on them, and fitting the articles is tough, since they have exact word counts (on the front page, articles can spill over).

Deconstructing Milstein

Munier Salem — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

You can find a link to the audio slideshow "Deconstructing Milstein" by clicking on the image.

Dramatis Design-ae

Carol Zou — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:17:14 -0400

OK. In the words of my father, no more ‘hanky-panky’. Enough talking the talk and waxing poetic about design philosophy; it’s time to walk the design walk (more like a sidestep, really) for all you design aficionados out there. An introductory paragraph this dramatic can only introduce one subject: white space*.

As Assistant Design Editor Deborah Tan pointed out in her previous post,what you don’t see is just as important as what you do see in a newspaper.

What's in a Design?

Deborah Tan — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:51:50 -0400

My first encounter with design was when my first-grade teacher told me to draw a design across a faded sheet of construction paper. As I sat there, a fat, violet Crayola marker resting in my fingers, I felt a looming sense of uncertainty concerning the instructions at hand. A design? Did that really mean we could draw anything?

Of Mice, Men and Enginerds

Munier Salem — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Every day, millions of scissors take to the pages of local papers as avid readers rescue interesting content from the eventual fate of their morning paper. The provocative article favorite astrology clipping or picture of Jimmy’s last soccer goal are saved from the recycling bin and forever immortalized on the kitchen fridge or the office bulletin board.

Confessions of a Design Editor

Carol Zou — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:06:38 -0500

Confession: I buy but never read The Economist, because I know the mere act of carrying it around will make me seem more intelligent than I actually am. Nothing screams a well-informed interest in Cuban politics quite like sans-serif fonts cleanly juxtaposed against the photo du jour on The Economist’s front cover. If you’ve ever judged a book, magazine, or newspaper by its cover, then you know that the design of a publication speaks volumes about its intended demographic.

A Full Color Press

Munier Salem — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 03:17:53 -0500

At one point or another in high school English class, a project comes along where the teacher asks you to make a fake newspaper; you know...where the headlines read something along like "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Found Dead" or "Hobbit Finds Gold, Magic Ring." If you’re any sort of ambitious student, you probably tried to make the project actually look like a newspaper with columns, headlines, bylines, tiny type...that distinct, tight, unmistakable look of newsprint, that always made current events that much more intimidating to read.