The airline mergers package

Allyson Murphy, a page designer for the business section of the Newark Star-Ledger, explains how the front page came together one day last month when news broke about potential airline mergers.

Murphy says, “This was a cover that came together late in the day and I put together a pretty simple photo illustration that I think made for an eye-catching page. Because we’re so close to Newark Airport, we can always get great staff shots of planes landing and taking off. But they become standard pretty quickly and we had just run one the previous week. So we decided to play off the merger road signs. I think this worked well since the stories also focused on how the mergers will affect consumers (and travelers.)

“I built the sign in Illustrator, brought the whole thing into photoshop to give texture to the pole and the screws. The clouds were dropped in behind from a stock photo. We don’t often bring images up into the masthead, but I think it makes a strong impact on a page like this. We had two stories in the package which fit perfectly into the spaces on either side of the pole.”