With this feature, I wanted to portray the gritty, primeval nature of the Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde with the crisp, almost ethereal photography of the story. With the sharp but distressed line elements and the sans-serif fonts, I lead the reader along a similar trail to the riders in the story in a juxtaposition of the landscape’s timelessness and the riders’ contemporary mountain bikes.

Continuing the juxtaposition of the ancient and modern, I used the distressed vector elements to show that the riders in the story aren’t the main focus, and that the land itself is far more important in the grand scheme of things. The riders are visiting a place that’s been largely unchanged for tens of thousands of years. There may be a path through the ancestral land, but the land is immutable, and the riders are fleeting.

Design elements are nice, but once they’ve been established, some spreads can be primarily supported by photos as readers become engrossed with the narrative. It’s a balance of minimalism and allowing the photography to paint a picture that the story fleshes out.

Every element has a different weight that directs the reader’s eye through a spread. Inset photos that give context or illustrate a specific part of a story draw the eye in, large, more general photos and complex shapes provide structure, and pull quotes capture passive readers who may have flipped to a particular spread and get them to read the whole story.

Any story has a balance of lifestyle shots, landscape shots, artsy shots and action shots to build stoke, provide eye candy, establish the setting and illustrate the characters. The trick is to use each type of photo in conjunction with the others in a way that matches the tone of the story while not overemphasizing particular aspects that are relevant but not as significant to the narrative. When I design features, I like to picture how the story feels as if it’s ending. Sometimes it’s a mountain biker riding off into the sunset. Sometimes it’s the feeling of going home. Sometimes it’s contentedness, an unanswered existential question, or coming to terms with a tragedy. The trick is matching how the reader might be feeling by the end of the words in the story with how the layout and photos will make them feel.