The following samples are mainly page designs done for various newspapers for which I have worked over the past several years.
Below is the cover of a sports section front for a newspaper in Burlington, North Carolina, where the editor obviously got a big charge out of the Game of Thrones saga. He provided the photo of the high school football player. I hunted down the appropriate typeface and added the Photoshop effects to it and to the player's face and background.
The Poughkeepsie Journal provided me with a lot great opportunities for fun illustration as well as imaginative page layouts and designs. I believe they still sponsor this little contest for young children to write and submit their own "scary" stories at Halloween time. I had a few photos of screaming kids and some adults that I was able to make look like kids, drew their portraits in pencil, then scanned those into the computer to add color and other features, arranging them around the newspaper so that they're screaming at their own stories. I also created the logo in the middle of the page, which was later used on t-shirts, which were handed out as part of the award for the best stories.
Below is another full-page layout for the sports section front of the Rochester (NY) newspaper, celebrating the induction of Buffalo Bills' Thurman Thomas into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I manipulated the typeface and arranged it around the cutout image of Mr. Thomas, along with the other photos and textual information.
The following few pages are from my time with the Boston Herald, a tabloid-format newspaper that generally encouraged lively page design, especially in the Sports section, as well as the Features section/"Society page."
The following few pages are designs done for the Cortland Standard in Cortland, New York, the "Crown City" of New York state because it supposedly has the highest elevation of any city in the state (there are other locales that are higher, but this is the highest "city," even though the "city" can be walked from one end to the other in about 40 minutes). It is an afternoon newspaper, with an 11 a.m. press start, which means that when most of the staff arrived at about 7, we had nothing else on our minds except drilling the paper together as fast as possible. I believe it a very good paper for its size and circulation. The afternoons left me pretty well free to take some time composing the Living & Leisure section for the next day (since it only very rarely had breaking news to run). They had certain set templates that I was allowed some liberties to play with and it was usually an enjoyable task, and I think most people there were generally satisfied with the end result(s).
Below is a cover done for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, highlighting Dick Vitale's Annual Gala to fight pediatric cancer, a fund raising event that he still runs every year. The idea here is, while not everyone can say they particularly like Mr. Vitale and his "Yeah, baby!" antics, most everyone can get behind the cause he's striving for.
Below is a page and illustration put together for the Augusta (Georgia) Chronicle, all about the Masters Tournament. If it needs to be stated, the heads on the Mount already are those of Bobby Jones (the originator of the tournament), Arnold Palmer, and Jack Nicklaus. The choice of who should be in the running for #4 spot was not up to me, or else I wouldn't have thought to include Clifford Roberts, who partnered with Bobby Jones to fund the event at its inception in the 1930s. Some debated whether Tiger Woods should be there since he had been struggling to regain his former glory in recent years. The sports editor's wisdom prevailed, Woods made the cut and went on to win the tournament that year, much to a lot of peoples' surprise.
