Designing with no art

One of the most irritating things that can happen to me as a designer is when I find out that there isn't any art to work with for a story.
However, if you can still come up with a good design despite this challenge, you pretty much win the game.
The best example that I have so far of creating a compelling design without an illustration or a photo is the cover that I did for our budget special section.
Drawing inspiration from wordle, I created a word cloud that included important words that can be associated with the budget cuts. To do this, I went through dozens of stories that we had put together and picked out words or phrases that helped to tell the story.

A&E designs

One of the biggest challenges for me every week is designing the Arts & Entertainment cover. Because it requires more creativity and usually demands a much different approach than page one design, it can be easy to draw a blank when I sit down to design.
These are some of my favorite A&E Covers that I had a lot of fun working on:

Designing for fashion

A couple of months ago, myself, Krystal Bick and Amy Beck put together a spring fashion preview. For this project, I helped pick out models, pick the photo shoot location (the El Cortez hotel), pick out outfits, art directed the photo shoot, selected photos and laid out the pages. I think this is probably my best work so far.
One of the main challenges was making this fashion preview look different from the fashion preview we did in the fall. I think that this was successful. This is the fall preview:


















For the fall fashion shoot, we decided to go up to Mt Rose and take some photos in an outdoor setting. We also did a separate page for men and women. When we started planning the spring fashion preview, we decided to pick a setting that would be very different from fall preview. By choosing an old-fashioned hotel, we were able to get a very different theme.
The first idea we had when it came to designing the preview was that we wanted it to be more magazine-like. I had a lot of fun designing the cover to look like a magazine cover. We also decided to combine the mens and womens fashions into a spread.