Well, what do you think?

[Bill Wambeke]

In hindsight the green border doesn''t go with all of the items and I wish there were about three less so I could have had more white space.

[Tim Frank]

Hi Bill, Thanks for being the brave one to get this started. Nice page with good organization.

I agree about the green borders. Perhaps pulling a color from one of the spices could work better as an accent color. If you cropped the ingredient photos to get rid of the backgrounds, they will be more compelling and the readers will really see the textures. Then, you won't even need borders.

If you have a good relationship with your editors, you can work with them to try to write or edit the ingredient blurbs to be closer to the same length. That way you can make the images align into a cleaner grid.

The lead photo probably shows too much store clutter and not enough food to really sell the package. What you you think about making a grid of the tightly cropped ingredient photos your dominant piece? Maybe the environmental shot could be grouped with the short story below.

Once again, nice job. Just throwing out ideas. Anyone else?

(It was smart to upload a hi-res page, so we can zoom in and see what the story is about.)

[Bill Wambeke]

Thanks. That was really helpful. With all the pieces of art, making the grid the centerpiece probably would have been a good idea. However, selling our photog on that would have been a whole other cup of tea. If I'd have had more than an hour to work on the page I'd have built a couple of different options to give them a visual idea.

[Tim Frank]

You did that in less than an hour? That's impressive. Are pages like this done on deadline?

[Bill Wambeke]

Yeah, it was probably an hour, hour and a half I took to build it, then I had to build the four inside pages before 6 p.m. It's not uncommon for me to do three sections a night. Total page count is around 8-14, depending on the amount of wire pages we have, it has gotten as high as 23, but that was a Saturday when we have a ton of wire pages and I have to build our Business and Opinion sections as well as finish our Main section.

[Tim Frank]

Yeah, that's a pretty good load. I have some material on how to get more time for presentation. Let me se if I can put something together that might be helpful. Keep swinging!

[Tim Frank]

I put up a blog post about getting more time for design. It's a bit wonky, but it could make your job easier. Not as easy as being able to hire some help, though. Good luck!