Last week I touched on the creative process and how I create linkbait graphics for articles and content. Relating to the creative process, check out this interview from PingMag with San Francisco-based Stan Zienka who is the design director of branding with the agency Attik. Some great insight into his process.

Today I am going to take a look at a particular site and see what the approach to creating graphics or using photography is for them.

For this example, I am using Newsweek and a specific article on Internships and Careers. Newsweek seems to just use photography and does it sparingly. At least it uses a great source, Corbis, for these photos.

I reviewed many articles and couldn’t find any custom graphics. Maybe they don’t have the resources or time to create specific images for the content. It is much easier to just pull some stock photos and crop here and there.

Does it hurt the article? Not entirely if it only has one photo that kind of relates to the content, but I am sure it would help it greatly if it had a custom graphic and some photos.

First things first. I read the article and get the idea. OK, there is this place called the University of Dreams among others that if you pay them some cash they will get you a spot in a top internship while your in college, and more students and parents are going this route every year.

Here is how the header looks in the original article:

I would do 2 things to improve upon this article.

• First, I would make the main photo into a custom graphic and change the format to a wider size. The photo is pretty good actually, it could be taken further though.
• Second, I would use a pull quote that would be placed further down the page, maybe just below or on the fold. If any supporting photographs can be added to any of that, great. If not, I am sure the 2 changes would be an improvement.

So I will use their original title ‘The Price of Success: Want to land a top summer internship? It’ll cost you $6,000‘ for my graphic, but I will change the format around. I will use a ‘classy‘ looking serif font for the first part of the title to relay the ‘success‘ part:

Then I would search for a quote from someone in the article. If nothing jumps out then I would use anything that is supporting the main point.

Even if this article had a simple ‘pull-quote‘ in it I feel it would benefit from it, because that is the job of the pull-quote, to pull the reader in further. Get them interested.

It may seem a bit condensed in this example but with a lot of text breaking up the distance between the first paragraph after the header graphic till this pull quote it will be a nice break and something the reader can look at first and think of how the text will get there.

It may be beneficial to throw in a photo or two to support visually any words. For instance with a companies name why not use a logo to back it up. Here I use the logo for the University of Dreams. I could have used the logos for the various companies the article mentions where top internships are taken with.

So custom graphics do take a bit more time and effort, you actually have to read past the first paragraph, but they are valuable. It adds to the richness and thus the experience of the reader. This may be the difference between a reader coming back for a repeat visit.

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