There was plenty of traffic in transportation stories today – you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting one. Some were dominated by maps, others by images and one went with words – demonstrating a range of story-telling techniques:
Sunday News-Journal
Charlotte Sun
Chicago Tribune
The Indianapolis Star
Journal & Courier
The Virginian-Pilot

The Sunday Record was…colorful. But many more papers were arrangements in gray and black:
The Orange County Register
Sun Journal
The Oklahoman
The State
Beaver County Times

The Chronicle-Tribune made good use of the one-word-headline-ending-in-a-period technique. But maybe they should have saved this device for stories of greater finality, as did the Chicago Tribune last year.

There weren't any award-worthy Oscar presentations but there were these from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Burlington County Times.

Both The Columbian and the Richmond Times-Dispatch blended letterforms and images – a technique that rarely works. Resist this temptation whenever possible.

The Monitor asked, "What's going on in there?" The design of this page begs the same question. The Sunday News Sentinel had fun with words and images in their centerpiece, but an otherwise busy page detracted from the overall effect. They've made better use of white space in the past.

Texas' Star Telgram tapped Kansas for their lead headline and made good use of an above-the-nameplate image.

The Wyoming Eagle-Tribune did their homework on a thoughtfully presented education package that was filled with carefully presented information. The Sunday Post-Dispatch took these story-telling techniques one step further, making it today's BFD.

The PD's package on development plans for Lambert Field presented a highly relevant package with a declarative headline, an information-packed graphic and descriptive text that highlighted and explained the four major proposed improvements. Everything fit neatly above the fold for effective single-copy presentation.

Room for improvement: The red bar containing the price tag for these improvements competed with the red stripe beneath the nameplate. A different signature color for the Lambert package, such as the blue found in the main image, would have avoided this conflict and separated this package from other elements.

About 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 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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