comment from newspaper design consultant from canada

[ehwan kurniawan]

Lucie Lacava

Hello Ehwan! I finally had a good look at your portfolio. I must say that you have some amazing pages, and clever photo and illustration ideas. You put a lot of energy and creativity into your work, and try to compensate when the art you have is not very good.

I especially like following pages: LUKA 05 Topik, 08 topik, James Bond, kejaksaa agung, dpr kerdilkan, hlm 52-53, merapi, Politik - Gayus 1... anti-tsunami, grafis hukum...

Some very good pages are overworked, this is when you have too many good ideas and use them all at the same time: like the 01 cover teroris, the tearing of the paper is a good effect, but using it twice is not necessary, plus you have a photo of the motorcycles on an angle, all good images but try not to use them all at the same time.
Other example would be of using colour screens behind illustrations, not always necessary, sometimes the white paper background will make the art stand out better...

Here's my advice:
-use only the two main editorial fonts for titles. Even if you are working on special stories, using decorative typefaces make good pages look like adverts: Gila Game, and Kopi premium Indonesia, the italic type is not necessary, also wisata extrem, ortu tungal...
-create a colour palette for your paper, you can have many colours but be disciplined in using them, restrain from using too much of it on backgrounds. Use the same colour palette for the infographics.
-edit your portfolio, 192 pages is too many, try to cut it down to 100 or even 50 if you can, only show your very best work.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions.
It was nice meeting you!
All the best!