Obama Cover Page Designs

Posted by Michelle Petit-Sumrall as Web Development, design

I’ve been looking for this for days for my other blog, and finally found what I needed. I hope it will remain active forever, it’s quite the resource! This site has cover pictures; from the newspapers of the world on the day after Barack Obama became “President-elect Barack Obama”. I warn you, there are literally hundreds of images. Even with a fast connection, it could take a while.

Even a cursory look reveals some covers (even American ones) didn’t consider the event important enough to do away with front page ads or to make the story “above the fold”, which is (according to this Wikipedia article):

a graphic design concept that refers to the location of an important news story or a visually appealing photograph on the upper half of the front page of a newspaper. Most papers are delivered and displayed to customers folded up, meaning that only the top half of the front page is visible. Thus, an item that is “above the fold” may be one that the editors feel will entice people to buy the paper. Alternatively, it reflects a decision, on the part of the editors, that the article is one of the day’s most important. By extension, the space above the fold is also preferred by advertisers, since it is the most prominent and visible even when the newspaper is on stands.

The term can be used more generally to refer to anything that is prominently displayed or of highest priority.

Researching the term lead me to another design article dated September 2007 discussing the usefulness of design web pages that place “important” information “above the scroll”, meaning before a user has to scroll.

The concept had it’s use back in the late 80s-early 90s, when surfing the net felt more like traveling the world in a hot air balloon then jetting around on the Concorde. Pages scrolled for days (an Americanism that means they went on forever) because making someone click on a link to continue getting information seemed like an unnecessary punishment. Therefore were we putting as much information as possible on a single page.

Things have changed, however. Long articles are “continued” on the “next page” (often linked both at the top and bottom). Everyone expects some degree of scrolling, but we also expect to be able to navigate to “page 2″ (or 23). The trick now is to make important things literally bigger, and/or more colorful against a simplified, streamlined design. I still think very long scrolls are excessive (I’d rather not have to scroll more than 3, maybe 4 times if it can be avoided), but so long as it’s all vertical rather than horizontal, I’m happy.

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