When a newspaper lays-off half its graphic artists and designers...

-
... you get page one presentations like this!

Take a look at today's The Sydney Morning Herald front page. Looks okay, I suppose. A bit dense and text-heavy perhaps. Not a lot of visual pizazz. But they do have an interesting (if pretty grim) main picture. But wait, what's with those arrows?

It looks like someone's child has 'air-brushed' (badly) an arrow in Photoshop and plonked it onto the photo a few times using their pagination software (Cyber, I think it's called). Clicking the above rag-out enlarges it to reveal how Press Display picks up the text and image boxes overlaying the image too.

It's not very slick, is it? Actually, it's laughably hideous, utterly unprofessional and rather humiliating. Unless of course I'm missing a 'graffiti redesign' announcement.

Fairfax Media, The Sydney Morning Herald's owner, recently laid-off half of the title's graphic artists and designers, with the money saved from these job cuts to be spent on new reporters.

Hmmm, right, who needs good visuals? Not Fairfax newspapers any more it would seem.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapel isometric cutaway step-by-step...

-
Image
   As part of a  Graphic News  package ahead of the UK royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, I was tasked with creating an isometric cutaway diagram of St George's Chapel within the grounds of Windsor Castle.    It turned out to be one of the most challenging illustrations of my career and took eight days to complete. There was not a great deal of good reference out there, so I had to mostly make do with satellite imagery, copies of old plans, a couple of interior 360° panoramas and tourist photos. The following 100 screen grabs show how I created it using Adobe Illustrator  (images can be enlarged by clicking on them) . Step 1: Gather the most reliable research material Step 2:  Draw as accurate a floorpan as possible — everything else depends on this being right Stage 3:  Fold it into an isometric plane (strictly speaking this is not true isometric but an angle of my own liking) ...
Read more

How I cutaway the Xbox Series X...

-
Image
I should point out from the get-go that this is an Adobe Illustrator illustration and not an exact CAD model or precise render of the inner workings of the upcoming XBox Series X games console. Think of it more as an indication of how it works, based on the best publicly available images from Microsoft. It was a relatively tricky graphic to do and had some quite fiddly elements to create in 3D. Here is the abridged process in 10 screen grabs. The images can be enlarged by clicking them, if you wish. I begin by taking some screenshots from the XBox website that show the console's innards. I skew one image into an approximation of a flat, face-on viewpoint and proceed to draw components. These are the elements laid on top of each other – making sure they all fit together. Time to extrude elements into 3D shapes, using reference photos from the XBox website. All the, now 3D, elements laid on top of each other – making sure they still fit together. Now to work out how to pull them ap...
Read more

An unfortunately timely reminder...

-
Image
It's sad when a portfolio graphic is on a topic as ghastly as 9/11, but sometimes they are and sometimes they become timely again and should be dusted off and aired once more. Published August 21, 2002 I did this one for Reuters almost a year after the attack, when investigators had had a chance to decipher what had failed so terribly with the construction of the World Trade Center twin towers. I remember it being a very time-consuming graphic as I wanted to get every detail (as was known then) correct to the best of my ability. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Eleven months earlier, on September 11, 2001, I had been doing a rare light feature graphic for Reuters – most of their topics were of a more serious nature, but occasionally we were permitted to do something less hard-newsy. Mine that day had been a graphic intended to show the benefits of a new video game console that was about to launch. It was about 2pm in London and I was just sta...
Read more