Seeing your work in print never gets old. Spokesman-Review designer Charles Apple is experiencing that thrill several editions over.
“It was a matter of ‘pass it forward,’” Apple said. “The hope is that papers will find readers love these pages.”
And they have: Pop culture and historic event pages are particularly popular.
We reached out to Apple for an update on his project, which we originally covered in March.
How do you select what topics you'll research and design in this format?
Apple: Some are based on the news or on news topics that are percolating beneath page one. One of my specialties is politics, so I’ve done a number of pages on elections, polls, historical control of Congress and so on.
And I have a huge interest in history. So I love finding historical anniversaries and then telling readers the story behind the story. Or putting events into perspective with numbers or a timeline.
I’ve been getting the most feedback, however, on Further Review pages that I’ll call “pop culture” — basically “features” topics. Just last week, for example, all four of my pages were “pop culture” pages: The 60th anniversary of the release of Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham,” the first appearance of Betty Boop 90 years ago, Vampire movies (which tied into the release of the new Stephanie Meyer book) and a look at the highest-charting novelty songs.
Of course, the visual angle is important. I try to aim for topics that have a visual “hook” of some sort: Some numbers I can build around, or a timeline or a list. Or a big photo that can run down the side of my page. For that “Green Eggs and Ham” page, I took the list of the 50 words Theodor Geisel used and built a giant chart, running down the side of the page that showed how often he used each one. I made that bar chart green and then used the orange book cover. That gave me a striking look for that page.