Today's front pages offered several studies in contrast, and some one-of-kind solutions.

The Boston Globe and The Herald-Sun ranked with ranks of police officers. The San Jose Mercury News and Highlands Today both used grids of photos for stories on taxes and legislation. The Los Angeles Times was 25 days and a design-solution short with their light bulb package, which the Merc did better more than three weeks ago.

The News & Observer had a poignant photo as part of their folo on their local fires. The Omaha World-Herald had a rich color photo that probably printed beautifully on their new MAN Roland press.

The Virginian-Pilot used a magazine-style treatment for their lead narrative. The Philadelphia Daily News was powerful, but they stretched for a story that wasn't local.

The Winston-Salem Journal put all the pieces together to tell the story of fallen police officer, making it today's BFD.

The Journal's package had it all: Compelling headline, scene-setting photo, breakout bio box on the victim and an informational graphic that described the events step by step.

Room for improvement: This informational graphic could have been improved in several ways, most notably the placement of the numbers which relate the words to the images. It would have been easier to "connect the dots" if each sentence of the narrative chatter had begun with a number, rather than sprinkling the numbers within the text.

A clarification of the criteria for choosing each day's BFD: The goal is not to merely pick a beautiful and flawless front page from the countless number that are published each year – the SND contest does a pretty good job of that by allowing anyone to enter their very best pages regardless of when they were published.

In contrast, BFD picks the best front page published on one particular day. Based on that narrower criteria, it's likely that the best front design each day will be less than perfect. Clearly, there will be better front pages published on other days by other papers. But that doesn't negate the fact that we think each day's BFD was better than the rest, its flaws notwithstanding.

However, if you think a better page was published that day, by all means please mention it in the comments section below.


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