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.