Wow. So, the real reason why I’ve been so MIA is because of Outside Lands, and the all work that went into making this year’s coverage the best we’ve done at the Daily Journal. We’ve covered the gourmet music festival the last three years, and I have to save, 2011 was the hardest we’ve hit. I took two photographers, did a preview, filed a story after day one, locked up a couple of interviews for a feature piece and turned in a review. And that was on top of running around Golden Gate Park trying to catch as much music as possible. Tired? Yes.
First, the preview and infographic — As is accustomed on this blog, click for a larger view.
The graphic was built at first to fit a 10×10 section of the Weekend Journal, which was slightly larger than what we ran in 2010. Remember that one? No? Click here. The thing was, the festival in 2011 was back to three days, so that meant we had to squeeze more into a relatively small amount of space. And I didn’t want it to be just a copy-and-paste job, re-inserting information from this year into last year’s graphic. But after doodling and tinkering, and doodling some more, I came to the conclusion that there was no way to do what I needed in the space. So, WE MUST GO BIGGER! And we did. I sent the guys from the Journal a peak and told them that we could run it page 1 of the Weekend Journal and run my preview on top and that they had to say yes because I would cry if they didn’t. Email had this attached:
I got an email a couple of minutes later from Jon Mays (AKA The Most Electrifying EIC in Newspaper Entertainment today) which simply read “yes.” OK. Good enough for me. As you can see, it changed, a lot. I reduced the size of the OL art on the bottom so I could include night show information, added more illustrative details, but kept the calendar (which I really dug for some reason). Draft one is complete on Tuesday, goes to the awesome Heather Murtagh for proofing the same day, gets a visual critique by the Production Team at the Daily Journal and is completed on Thursday for Friday’s edition. Somewhere in that process, I get to write a preview, and that thrown on top of the graphic. The finished product come out on Day 1 of Outside Lands.
I liked the end product. Oh …
Ok. With that out of the way, it was time for the ‘fun’ stuff. Don’t get me wrong, going to Outside Lands is different than working it. And we worked (pretty) hard at the Daily Journal.
Oh My July! 