The Art of Page Design

I want to be a newspaper page designer when I grow up. Yay.

I chose to follow a different route than most people in our class by finding out what The Detroit News Presentation Editor Rick Epps does on a typical day...or should I say a very unusual day...in the newsroom.

After walking into a brass knuckle fight near downtown Detroit's Greyhound Bus Station (no I am not kidding) I took a few minutes to ponder by day at The News. Here are words to summarize the day: sports, big rooms, page design, MSU, old school and new-kid-on-the-block designers, and of course "small plates" of lettuce-wrapped goodness somewhere in the middle.

Seven designers were gone on a sick day, which according to Detroit News Design Editor Erin Sprauw, "have never happened in my time here." Five designers and a Saturday edition to make in eight hours; you do the math. Rick Epps had quite the night ahead of him to say the least. My claim to fame was helping with some minor errors on an inside sports page. Well, working on any page in The Detroit News now is not minor to me by any means.