Q&A with Emmet Smith

Time for another SportsDesigner.com Q&A.

Emmet Smith at the Cleveland Plain Dealer worked on a year-in-review spread that caught my eye.

• It seems the big challenge with these type of packages is that you have no live art. Or perhaps that's a blessing.

No, great live art is always a blessing.
With these things that roll around every year I think the challenge is to figure out how to go about them.

Themes seem to be the default solution but I'm a bit wary of them because I feel like sometimes the theme or the joke gets in the way of the content, even if it is just the same story you wrote last year with new names.

So I've been trying to get our department to go with very loose themes. This year in review package was based around an old Paula Scher poster (ed: this one perhaps).

We took strong color, type and design cues from that and blended those with the Plain Dealer's style and used that to display our writer's take on the year that was.

It let the content feel special without relying on a lot of photo illustration and pun headlines. Yeah, I know, I'm no fun.

• I keep thinking of the visual style you chose. It sort of reminds me of concert flyers you see on telephone poles. And a splash of ESPN mag.

Age & environment ...

I do think ESPN the Mag does some great conceptual work. I remember a couple years ago when Roethlisberger was in his first year with the Steelers and won his first 10 starts or something they had did this cover that was just a nice portrait of him overlaid on this gritty piece of steel with the headline "Stainless."

I thought it was perfect ... the type and image took it beyond your standard portrait.

I think it taught me that even if we don't have Los Angeles Times-perfect pieces — and who does? — with the right idea we can still do very good work. All anyone needed to do that cover was a decent shot of Ben and stock shot of weathered steel, flip Ben's layer to multiply in Photoshop and viola.

I do try and look at as much as possible. Of course there's The Book, but anymore I find myself more enamored with the annuals from the Print, the Society for Publication's Designer's, Type Director's Club, et al.

Outside of that there's magazines, wine labels, book jackets, anything.

Cleveland's great because, much like Detroit, we never tear anything down. So there's so much old signage and stuff here to look at and take cues from.

• The page toppers did a nice job of creating a dominant visual element, allowing you to be a little less overbearing with any lede images on each page.

That was more a necessity than a luxury. This year in review was a flip from what we had done the past few years.

In the past we did a day-by-day chronology as the main piece and small breakouts on heroes, goats, etc. So we would use big art from those events wherever it fell in the chronology.

This year we decided to make the chronology the secondary element and play up the commentary on the good guys, bad guys, top moments and quotes from the year.

That meant we'd be doubling up a lot on imagery and needed the pictures to be more iconic than taking anyone back to one certain moment.

So those toppers allowed us to pull the feel from the cover, set the tone inside and
establish some visual weight on each page

• Are you sick of LeBron (future free agent)?

If you're sick of LeBron, you're not a sports fan. The guy is amazing. And we don't use the F-A word in regards to LeBron around here.

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Thanks to Emmet. You can see his portfolio here.