A good eye for design

... is it an acquired skill or is it inherent? 

I've always had the good fortune of having editors who could easily tell the difference between a good design and a crappy one.  Newspaper and Yearbook have two distinctly different design needs - fundamentally because of the paper stock and use of ink.  Newspapers saturate and need less ink and generally use much less color.  Yearbooks, on the other hand, require higher photo quality, more efficient use of white space and knowing when to bleed and when not to.  Both require an eye for composition, entry points, and unity – so that readers aren't confused by where to start.  Font selection matters and how the fonts are packaged; less is more in my world.

Teaching these concepts has been a true challenge this year.  For the first time, I think the newspaper editors get it – more than editors in the past.  When I tweaked their pages, they knew exactly what I had done to make their pages look good (i.e., a pica around all screened boxes and between elements; flush right on all photo credits and flush left on the headlines; justified captions; alignment matters.)  They saw this as soon as it was done on their pages but not before.  "This looks really good!" they exclaimed.  "We did this?"  Well, not exactly, but almost.  I think the next issue will be easier to lock up than the first, and so on.  Today, their designs were okay, but some of them saw a need for more grids on the dummy layout sheets, so I made them a new template to redraw their sketches.

Yearbook editors aren't quite so savvy yet.  They aren't taking the time to study the clippings they want to emulate on the screens.  Too many text boxes all over the place and no sense of space or alignment.  Color?  This looks pretty.  No entry points.  Even the folios are random and different point sizes.  Outlined type on one-word headlines aren't headlines.  They are labels that don't explain squat.  And I haven't read the first word yet.  It's going to be a long year if I can't get them to see that the pages have no unity.  "Let's make a plan."  WHAT?  A plan?  We have a plan.  "No, not exactly." 

I'm having a hard time with the concept of spending thousands and thousands of dollars on a crappy looking design.  I love their cover, endsheet, title page, opening, dividers and folio concept.  But the spreads are ordinary and blah.  The colors are not enough to tie the designs together (blue and gray). 

I need more inspiration and I haven't found it yet.  It better come to us soon as we must ship our first 40 pages in the next two weeks.  Wisdom, I need you NOW.