Critique - week 13

This week I won the cover competition by default after Theresa and Michelle both designed for 30 under 30 (and did a totally incredible job) and Tova won the True/False cover competition. Because we were extremely limited by photo options, I ended up trashing my initial idea because we didn't have the photos to support it and played with several other options before settling on the one pictured below.

I think what resulted was a pretty happy solution to the problem. (The problem was that the subjects of the stories, who are police officers, did not want to be photographed in uniform (with one exception) because they don't work in uniform. Furthermore, the photographers only shot extremely low-key photos of the officers, which did not allow for a great deal of flexibility.) Because the story was slugged "Faces of the Force" and was a set of profiles of five police officers, it seemed necessary to opt for photos of them rather than an illustrative option. The cover that will run in print tomorrow is a marriage of the two options that does not over-emphasize the dark, grittiness of the actual photos.

Incidentally, even though I like the cover, I'm most proud of beating out 25 editors for both the cover and feature headlines (and two of the sell lines!).